I recently pulled a Kaypro 2X I had out of storage for a few years The good news: It didn't explode. I seriously figured "I'd better work in an area where I can ventilate fast" because I expected RIFA consequences.
The more frustrating news: it wasn't particularly keen on booting from its own drives.
If I prepare a disc using ImageDisk and a Panasonic 360K drive on an XT clone, it generally doesn't even notice the disc is there at boot. (I'm not sure if that's a limitation of the bootstrap code, but it seems capable of saying "disc does not contain an operating system" under some scenarios).
If I take the Panasonic drive out of its host machine, jumper it to DS0, and connect it to the Kaypro, it boots fine.
From there, I can prepare an additional disk with one of the "original" drives as drive B, toggle the DS switches on the old drives to make that drive A, and boot from that.
It seems highly likely the drives are basically out of alignment. If I use DUTIL to copy the disc from drive A to B, it occasionally gets a track failed to read, and even if it succeeds, if I swap the discs, a disc written in drive B is not readable in drive A.
I have taken both of the Kaypro drives over to a PC and used ImageDisk to seek them back and forth (since my original thought was that the drives were stuck at one track). Nope, turns out, they're just surprisingly quiet when you seek them.
Now, the obvious way to solve the problem in 2021 is to chuck the spinning rust and buy FlashFloppy/Gotek style devices. But that seems inauthentic, and costs money.
I saw https://vswitchzero.com/2018/05/07/5-25-floppy-drive-alignment/ which makes it sound like you can do a marginal alignment yourself using ImageDisk and a known-good disc. I figure I could write a disc on the Panasonic as a "reference" and then align the Kaypro drives close enough to track it reliably. Then discs would at least be interchangeable within my home (and hopefully between drives A and B), and it's not like I expect a mountain of original Kaypro formatted floppies to appear here suddenly.
But I don't know how to get the drives disassembled enough to try this, or which screws to loosen and tweak. I'm sure this is super-drive-specific. The drives are labelled with a diamond-shaped logo possibly saying CMI or OMI, and the model GM 3305HU, and seem to be undocumented.
The more frustrating news: it wasn't particularly keen on booting from its own drives.
If I prepare a disc using ImageDisk and a Panasonic 360K drive on an XT clone, it generally doesn't even notice the disc is there at boot. (I'm not sure if that's a limitation of the bootstrap code, but it seems capable of saying "disc does not contain an operating system" under some scenarios).
If I take the Panasonic drive out of its host machine, jumper it to DS0, and connect it to the Kaypro, it boots fine.
From there, I can prepare an additional disk with one of the "original" drives as drive B, toggle the DS switches on the old drives to make that drive A, and boot from that.
It seems highly likely the drives are basically out of alignment. If I use DUTIL to copy the disc from drive A to B, it occasionally gets a track failed to read, and even if it succeeds, if I swap the discs, a disc written in drive B is not readable in drive A.
I have taken both of the Kaypro drives over to a PC and used ImageDisk to seek them back and forth (since my original thought was that the drives were stuck at one track). Nope, turns out, they're just surprisingly quiet when you seek them.
Now, the obvious way to solve the problem in 2021 is to chuck the spinning rust and buy FlashFloppy/Gotek style devices. But that seems inauthentic, and costs money.
I saw https://vswitchzero.com/2018/05/07/5-25-floppy-drive-alignment/ which makes it sound like you can do a marginal alignment yourself using ImageDisk and a known-good disc. I figure I could write a disc on the Panasonic as a "reference" and then align the Kaypro drives close enough to track it reliably. Then discs would at least be interchangeable within my home (and hopefully between drives A and B), and it's not like I expect a mountain of original Kaypro formatted floppies to appear here suddenly.
But I don't know how to get the drives disassembled enough to try this, or which screws to loosen and tweak. I'm sure this is super-drive-specific. The drives are labelled with a diamond-shaped logo possibly saying CMI or OMI, and the model GM 3305HU, and seem to be undocumented.