On Tue, 6 May 2003, Jim Battle wrote:
This past weekend I went to the monthly swap meet in
Livermore, CA. I
had a late start, the weather wasn't promising, and I was tired, but I
hadn't gone for a while so I went anyway. I'm glad I did.
I picked up a Kaypro II for $20, although the seller asked for "Oh, $20,
maybe $15" since he seemed like a nice guy.
It didn't have any floppies or any manuals, but the rest is pretty nice.
First, the case is in great shape. It was well taken care of. On power
up, the character generation is pretty clean.
More interestingly, it has had a lot of mods done to it. I haven't
opened it up yet, but some of the changes are evident anyway.
1) addition of a fan. this is way too noisy and I must replace it.
Also, it appears to be powered from the DC side of the power supply; I
infer this from the fact that the fan keeps running for 5-10 seconds
after power is removed!
Unless it is a late edition Kaypro II (check the nameplate to see
if it is a Non Linear Systems or Kaypro product) it is likely that
the power supply has been replaced as the early II PSUs were a bit
marginal in standard usage and would never hack an added hard
drive.
2) one of the full height 5.25" floppies is
replaced with a hard drive.
I haven't confirmed the size, but the seller recalled that it was 10
MB. The hard drive has been partitioned into A, B, C, and D drives.
The remaining floppy is E.
3) there is a RAM disk, which is F. I'm not sure of the size yet.
When you pull the cover, note whether there is a daughter board
that carries an 8088 and DRAM which indicates the presence of an
SWP add on with RAM disk not using the 64k standard memory.
4) On the rear there is a toggle switch: 2.5 MHz/5.0
MHz. Cool.
5) On boot up, I get a notice saying that it has the Advent TurboROM 3.0
(1985) modification.
Does it state the size of the operating system? 60K? 58K? ??
That is all to the good.
Now the bad news. The seller tried to "erase the hard drive", but said
he didn't remember enough how to do it. Well, he managed to erase the A
partition, although B, C, and D are still there. As you might expect, A
contained the most interesting stuff. I can't do PIP, nor STAT, nor ED,
nor DDT. The built-in DIR and TYPE work, of course, as I imagine the
other built-ins would.
None of these are mirrored in B-D I take it.
On cold boot and warm boot, I have to hit carriage
return a dozen times
or so to get past the "Drive A: BDOS bad sector" (or somesuch) spew, but
I do eventually get a prompt. So his attempt to erase the hard disk got
rid of the directory apparently, but not the boot tracks.
I am hopeful that the information is still there, and all I need to do
is somehow boot off of the remaining floppy and use a sector editor to
unerase the damage done to drive A. However, the fact that it is saying
"bad sector" instead of just saying drive A has "no files" on a DIR
would seem to indicate things aren't so simple. I may need to
completely rebuild drive A.
I've combed through the various CP/M archives and have found out a bit
about the Advent TurboROM. I believe that if I have a bootable disk, I
can put it into the "E" floppy drive and it will become the "A" drive
on
a reboot.
So that leaves the question: how to get a kaypro II disk image?
I would suggest that your immediate need is not a disk image, but
the missing utility files - plus a few more - and a readable disk
that contains them. If you can resurrect the boot track from the
hard disk and place it on a floppy, you will have the correct
version and size needed.
I have a PC (P-166) lying around that I added a
5.25" drive to for the
purpose of reading some trs-80 disks. I'm not sure of the drive density
at the moment; that was a while back. What density drive should I use
in my PC? What software it recommended for making a bootable disk?
Short of bothering the tireless Don Maslin, are there any disk images
available online that could help me out? Should I scratch any plans to
recover the CP/M 2.2 image on the A drive and instead just attempt to
reformat and reinstall CP/M (Or ZCPR?)
Presuming - always a problem - that your floppy is a 48tpi drive
(390k in Kaypro speak) it would be desirable to have a 48tpi
(360k) drive on the PC, but not absolutely necessary. I am
sending under separate cover a TeleDisk image of a Kaypro II SSDD
disk which contains a number of utilities that you should find useful
in your salvage effort. Most are the standard CP/M utilities - pip,
etc. - but the one that is most likely to be helpful on the HD is
DU-V78.COM. It comes with a pretty good explanation of usage. Study
it well, as it is a powerful tool and can do both good and terrible
things for you. It is a pretty good sector editor.
The TeleDisk image can be reproduced on either 48 or 96tpi drives.
Desirably, the disk would be bulk erased - degaussed - prior to
use if possible.
- don