Thanks for the info.
Made some progress on this, thanks to the appearance of another Kaypro 2 on my local craigslist, which I snapped up.
The second Kp2 was not immediately functional, and made a periodic chirp type noise which happened about twice a second.
Opened up Kp2.1 and Kp2.2, and took a look at the always-ejecting drives of Kp2.1. A small plastic piece which pushed the top part of the drive mechanism down onto the floppy was slightly cracked, and was at a slight angle. Looks like friction of this piece against the metal was supposed to keep it in place against the force of a spring pulling it back up. The crack and angle of the piece was keeping it from holding the drive mechanism in place and the force of the spring was just pushing it back up right away. I was able to push this piece slightly, rotating it about the metal rod on which it was mounted. I put a few drops of glue into the cracked bit. So far it is holding and the drive can stay closed, but we'll see.
In any case, with Kp2.2 I got some original Kaypro disks, so I had some original CP/M disks to try just in case my disk image was bad.
I decided to try replacing drive A in Kp2.1 with a half-height IBM Qumetrak drive. I changed the jumper to DS0 on that drive, and kept drive B (with the terminator pak) connected. Then I tried to boot from the CP/M disk image I had made earlier. The behavior was the same as I had observed before - the moment I put the lever down on the qumetrak, the message "No operating system on this disk" appeared on the screen and the drive stopped spinning.
Trying this with one of the original CP/M disks, now when I put the lever down, the drive head immediately moved all the way forward and started clacking loudly. It looked like the motor was trying to push the head forward and running against the physical stop of the drive.
So now I had seen the machine fail to boot from what I knew was a working drive. I next removed the mainboard from Kp2.2 and tried connecting it to the hardware from Kp2.1. Using the same CP/M disk, I turned the machine on and it came right up to the CP/M prompt!
Removed the qumetrak and connected the original drive from Kp2.1. Still booted right to CP/M.
I could copy the CP/M disk to a new disk in drive B, so it looked like Kp2.1's drives were working except for the mechanical fault in the plunger piece.
So it looks like there may be an issue on the mainboard of Kp2.1. And I thought that the original problem with Kp2.2 sounded like a power supply fault (no boot, no drive activity, only a 2hz clicking sound). I took the power supply board from Kp2.1, put it into Kp2.2, and restored the original mainboard of Kp2.2. And it worked, both drives seem fine.
I also discovered that I had not created the CP/M disk image properly. After putting the qumetrak back in the pentium machine, I ran imagedisk again and more carefully set the settings to single sided, single stepping, and ran it again. This time the CP/M disk image booted properly.
So now, Kp2.2 is working with a replacement PS. And it looks like the floppies from Kp2.1 are working, but there is likely an issue on the mainboard which keeps it from booting. I'm guessing that there may be a fault with the drive controller part of the mainboard. I don't have much knowledge of Kaypros so I'm not sure what that entails. And in order to get Kp2.1 working, I will need to fix the broken PS or replace it. Seems possible to use a more modern PS unit instead.
Sorry for the long winded description, but just happy to have a working Kaypro!
