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Kaypro II boot help

gimgim

Member
Joined
Feb 20, 2014
Messages
27
In a previous post I was mentioning that I am restoring two Kaypro II (one with the vertical drives) and needed a boot floppy.
Well, I've finally got one :)

The floppy has been tested and it's reliable and from a Kaypro II (my understanding is that there are differences).

When I insert the floppy, the boot stops before showing the prompt (compared to a youtube video). A message with the CPM version (63K 2.2G, I think) shows up in the upper left of the screen.
After that, the drives (both) keep spinning (the led of the drive A shuts down though) and the head won't try to seek other areas of the disk. This happens pretty much with all the four drives I have tried (I have switched the jumpers to the B drives and configured them as A before trying).

I don't know if the drives are properly aligned, but I've cleaned the heads and lubed the rails.
I have used an arduino to exercise the drives a bit and check that they spin at the right speed (double checked with a neon lamp as well), seek back and forth, find track zero, etc...
With arduino I can't test reading and writing though as it is not fast enough.

Any suggestion on what to check next? It seems unlikely that all four drives are misaligned.
 
I am puzzled...
The person who wrote the floppy said he has a Kaypro II as well, and the floppy was tested before shipping.
Any chance he may have a computer with a not-stock ROM?
 
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