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Kaypro 2 won’t write or format

retrobecanes

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 11, 2017
Messages
175
Location
Florida, USA
My Kaypro drive reads the directory and loads/runs programs but it will not write to disk or format a disk. It comes up with bad sector errors, etc. What could this be?
 
It could be bad Media, so try formatting in DOS to see if the media formats correctly. I typically use
Formatmaster (FMTMAS ver 2.19) as I have had very good results using it. If it says the media is
good it will format in CP/M. Another thing you can try is to use a Magnet to run over both sides of
the media and see if it formats. You can also use 22DISK to see if it will format the floppy.

What Floppy Drive Manufacture and Model? Have you verified that the Write Protect signal
to the Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) isn't telling the system that it is write protected?

Larry
 
Just for anyone else coming across this, I'd say check your power supply, too. One of my Kaypros basically worked fine, hours and hours on end, with GoTek's, or even _some_ disk drives. But when it was shipped, I found that one of the TEC disk drives wouldn't reliably format. May have had trouble writing, but it seemed to be a bit random. I ended replacing the power supply (well, ended up proactively replacing 4 Kaypro power supplies). When I replaced this one, I noticed that a printer problem I was having disappeared. (Printer would occasionally be unresponsive after long idle.) Skip to, the sporadic format/writing problems of that TEC drive are also gone.
 
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