rlauzon
Experienced Member
COPY is the command on my CP/M disk. That is what I see when I do a DIR. Typing COPY pulls up another screen which includes "BLANK" as an option. Here, I have the option of pressing the letter "B" which starts the formatting process. This is what the Kaypro user manual says is what to do to format a blank diskette. And at this point, I am getting the "bad sector" error. I tried to clean the B drive by inserting a disk cleanin diskette but I am unable to tell if the drive is turning the diskette. Cleaning the A drive is easy and the diskette turns but drive B is different because essentially drive B is a "slave" drive. I tried putting in the disk cleaning diskette and following the steps to format a blank diskette, but could not tell if the drive was actually turning. If I put a formatted master diskette (such as games) into drive B and press "B:" at the A prompt, the light shifts to drive B and I can type B:CATCHUM and that game will load so obviously, drive B is reading the disk; it's not WRITING to a disk in drive B.
Sounds like the write protect sensor is "stuck". I'm not sure what mechanism those drives use to detect the notch on the diskettes, but if it's not writing, it might be because the drive is not detecting the notch and thinking that the disk is write protected.