hotrod Kaypro acquisition & problem

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Tue May 6 03:43:00 2003

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 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?)

All suggestions are welcomed. Thanks.
Received on Tue May 06 2003 - 03:43:00 BST