I will say that the state of the floppy drives seems very prone to disks getting corrupted when moved around between drives. One minute you’re good, then a drive stops working right and the disk throws errors in drives that were reading fine a minute ago.
Go rewrite the disk freshly in #greaseweazle and you’re back in business until the next odd drive freak out scenario.
I have learned a lot and the drives gave me the hardware and the need/excuse to finally use #greaseweazle.
So I’ve repeatedly made working book disks to aid me in the saga.
And tonight, I made a Kaypro floppy from scratch as an image on my Mac, copied files onto it with cpmtools, wrote a disk from it with greaseweazle and got Zork running on two of the units.
Then one stopped booting properly and the other gets unstable after it’s on for a bit. Progress.
@WoodooProd I did clean the heads before I ever tried a disk in them and they worked briefly on that machine. Working great on #greaseweazle every time. My floppies are factory sealed new old stock, so clean as well.
I just swapped the main board of the second unit into this one and it boots again with its same drives… so increasingly think something drive controller related died minutes into my first use on the first unit’s main board. :(
Well, that's fun. Popped the drives back on the Kaypro 2, inserted the floppy and it booted right into CP/M 2.2.
Ran a couple of commands. Worked nicely. Then on the next command I ran the prompt hung. Restarted it and it prompts for the boot disk but doesn't read from the either floppy now. Drives still both work fine directly on #greaseweazle.
So... worked for a few minutes, then the drive controller or something in it seems to have crapped out. <sigh>
Whoa - this worked better than I ever dreamed! #greaseweazle seems happy with this Hi-Tech DSDD drive. I wrote out a .td0 Kaypro boot disk seemingly without error. I'm about to go test it on the computer.
On a whim, I stuck in a floppy of M.U.L.E. that I made on my 1541 last night (from a .d64 on a pi1541). Greaseweazle wrote out a .d64 very quickly. I attached the image to VICE on my Mac and it's playing perfectly in the background as I write this.
At a glance, this first Kaypro 2 machine seems to have a SSDD drive A and a DSDD drive B, so that crosses the wires a bit on ID between 2/84 and 2X. More digging to do...
Meanwhile, I have pulled the DSDD drive B and am giving it a thorough once over as a potential #greaseweazle drive. It's a HI-TECH "Echo" 548-50. Have to go steal a 4-pin molex off some PC carcass in the basement to rig up a convenient bench power supply for it.
Will try to make a boot disk. #cpm #kaypro2 #retrocomputing
RecoveryWhiskers 0.6.1 is out.
This is a small service release that makes the config directory put in the XDG config directory, meaning it should work on other platforms that are not Linux.
https://crates.io/crates/recovery-whiskers
https://codeberg.org/JennyFluff/RecoveryWhiskers
Is it useful or necessary? No. But did I enjoy making an RGBi cable, getting 80 column mode going on my C128 and then creating a functional DS/DD CP/M boot disk for the 1571? Yeah.
Will I do much with it? Probably not… but seeing it work is always satisfying. In truth, it might prove useful when I start restoring these Kaypro II machines since I see I can format floppies for them on the 1571… but I also want to dive into #greaseweazle for those.
Today, I am - once again - grateful to @Telev for his generous upload of "Populous" for the IBM-PC. This game is a true classic from 1989!
https://archive.org/details/populous-electronic-arts-inc.-360k-kfx
Telev78 is an excellent source for all kinds of unique floppy disk images on the Internet Archive! Reward him with a visit to his library! 
https://archive.org/details/@telev78
#RetroGaming #DOSGaming #IBMPC #DOS #DOSGaming #MSDOS #Populous #Simulation #InternetArchive #Greaseweazle #FloppyDisk
Aaron Mahler
The Oasis BBS
JennyFluff 
💾
DesertFOX