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KayPro II and KayPro 2 (1985) hang at boot

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davidestewart

Member
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
13
Hello all,
I have two KayPro's that seem to behave in the same fashion:

The KayPro II powers up and yields a message on the display requesting a disk be inserted in Drive A. The drive lights DO NOT come on and there is NO drive head activity. I can hear the drive motors spinning.

The KayPro 2x came with a dead power supply so I "borrowed" the one from my KayPro II for testing. After doing the swap, the KayPro 2x also shows the same behavior. Powers up to a legible screen reading "KayPro Corporation Version x.02(?)". Unfortunately NO disk activity and NO drive lights. I also can hear the drive motors spinning.

Any ideas where to start with this one?
 
Ziloo,
Thank you for the video, I have already watched it. Unfortunately it is not that informative as my KayPro2x is not cobbled together with parts from a II. Also, the machine in the video has disk drives that seek for track0 when the system is powered up. Neither of my KayPro's do this, I just get the splash screen. Considering that both of them do the exact same thing I feel like the issue could be something either known or obvious. If I have time over the weekend, im going to reseat the chips on the board. Then I'll start hunting around with an O scope. I have the after marked technical manual so I have some information of what to look for at various test points. Any other suggestions regarding checking the FDD controller circuit or how to check if the boot loader is getting properly loaded would be very helpful.
 
Well, if I had one power supply that caused two computers to behave exactly the same way, I'd be checking the power supply voltages at the connectors to the drives....
 
Druid6900,
This detail did occur to me and I did check the voltage on the power supply. 5V was present, I did notice that I was getting 11.6v instead of 12v on the associated terminal. All the chips on the board I checked were getting 5v on their power pin.
 
It BOOTED!!!!!!! The low voltage TTL usb to serial adaptor I have been waiting for arrived yesterday while at work. I was able to come home, flash the firmware on my Gotex FDD emulator with the HxC upgrade and bingo! So far the only thing I can get to boot is a universal ROM image for a KayPro10 (k10u-rld.td0 off the http://www.retroarchive.org/maslin/disks/kaypro/ website). My KayPro case says 2x and the system board has a romID of 81-478A. Any suggestions for an image that has more commands than PIP?
 
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