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Last revision of this page: November 17, 2024

Setting up a hard disk drive for the Kaypro 10 or 4/84 is actually quite simple. You just have to spend one hour of time and a little patience. If you have set up your hard disk again, you can also read it in with the MFM emulator from David Gesswein and then emulate it later. It works perfectly.

My (original) system configurations:

• Kaypro 10/83 (with 8K mod)
• 81-180 C mainboard
• 81-277A ROM
• Seagate ST225 (and ST412)
• CP/M 2.2H

You can easily add an (external) hard disk to a Kaypro 4/84. This Kaypro has the fully equipped universal mainboard (81-184). The only drawback is that you have to disable the second floppy drive. Now then, you have to die some kind of death. A and B are (the later) hard disks, drive C is the floppy drive. You can not use the 2nd floppy drive; for it you need the Advent Personality Decoder but with modification. The hard disk drive always uses the DRIVE SELECT B floppy signal.

• Kaypro 4/84
• 81-184 mainboard
• 81-292A ROM
• Seagate ST225 (and ST412)
• CP/M 2.2G

The complete procedure basically consists of four steps:

1. Formatting
• Kaypro
• Advent
2. Finding bad blocks
3. Building the CP/M system tracks
4. „On the move with“ PIP

The standard Kaypro 10 hard disk has 306 cylinders and four heads. No matter if it is actually a Seagate ST-225 (20 MB) or ST-212/412 (10 MB) hard disk. More than 9 MB are not supported! Furthermore, these 9 MB are logical divided into two drives of 4.5 MB each. When you boot from the hard disk, the first drive is called A: and the second drive is B:. The floppy disk drive is C:.

Four read-write heads are used. Heads 0 and 1 access drive A. Heads 2 and 3 access drive B. Disk 1, cylinder (same as track) 0, heads 0 through 3 refers to a critical area of the disk containing the operating System, BIOS, Error messages, and some overlays for screen graphics. [1]

I myself have only tested the Kaypro variant A) and the Advent variant B).

1. Kaypro
1. FORMAT06 & FMT7305
2. FORMAT
3. K10HDFMT
2. Advent TurboROM v3.4
1. K10FMT
2. ADVFMT
3. MICROCode KayPLUS ROM (not yet tested)
1. FORMAT
2. HDCNFG
3. HDCNFG_B

Kaypro

FORMAT06 & FMT7305

Both programs have the special feature that they can be used in batch files. But this feature makes them very dangerous. Immediately after you hit ENTER, either cylinders 0-6 or 7-305 are formatted. There is no query if you really want to format. You can cancel the program with CRTL-C, but then the damage is already done, especially with FORMAT06. So please be very careful. Be warned!

Rename the extension of both files to *.MOC, then nothing can go wrong. You can use FORMAT06 for a quick formatting if you are sure that your hard disk has no new bad blocks.

FORMAT

Unlike FORMAT06 and FMT7305, this program is not batch-capable. You must enter the hard disk parameters manually, usually (1,1) / (0,3) / (0,305). The FORMAT process takes about 15 minutes to format 100 cylinders, i.e. the whole process takes about 45 minutes.

K10HDFMT

Kaypro 10/12
Winchester Disk
Formatter
Version 1.03

(C) Copyright 1984
by
Kaypro Computer Corporation

I stopped the program because it is so incredibly slow (38 min / 100 cyl).

Advent TurboROM

ADVFMT & K10FMT

This is exactly how I imagine user-friendly formatting! From the user interface, both programs are the same; you only need ADVFMT if you want to add a 2nd hard disk. Otherwise, K10FMT is all you need.

Take a look at chapter 6 of the manual; everything is explained there in detail. First I tried the 1024 byte format with a Seagate ST225, but it does not work properly. Then I used the format 512 byte and everything goes fine.

The software is very flexible, you can select your hard disk by manufacturer, type or manual, then format it, check for bad sectors and finally partition it. The search for bad sectors is done with three different write patterns and two read passes each. Depending on the size of your hard disk, this may take some time.

Because I've been testing and reformatting all my Seagate hard disks for the last few days (mid Nov 2024), I just re-installed a ST-225 (20 MB) for fun. Since I only want to have two smaller partitions (5 MB each), I partitioned the ST-225 as ST-412 (10 MB). That's quite enough for me. As already described above, the ADVFMT program is simply good.

Kaypro

Just run FINDBAD B: and FINDBAD C:, that's all.

BAD BLOCKS are saved in the [UNUSED].BAD file. On the Kaypro 10, this file is normally found in USER 15, but if you do not have BAD BLOCKS, this file does not exist.

Regardless of the user area, the file name is "[UNUSED].BAD". If you don't find that file anywhere, then you don't have any clusters marked bad by FINDBAD. Sometimes you can get a clue by running STAT d:*.* on a drive, where d: is your drive letter. I'm not certain if FINDBAD includes the SYS attribute on [UNUSED].BAD to make it invisible to a DIR, but if it does, STAT should show it.

There is a difference between a block and sector when it comes to CP/M. CP/M uses a multiple of sectors to form allocation blocks (STAT DSK: will tell you how big the blocks are on each drive)--something like an MS-DOS cluster. Since you can't take a single sector out of circulation, you have to take the smallest allocatable unit that contains that sector out of circulation--a block, in other words. The only way CP/M has to do this is to allocate that block to a file (DOS uses a different method, but the outcome is the same--a group of sectors are rendered unavailable for allocation.)

DOS/Windows use allocation schemes that keep file names separate from allocation maps, so it's possible to mark a bad cluster in an allocation map without having a file associated with it. In CP/M, the file names (directory) and allocation map are all in one place, so it's not possible to allocate a cluster/block without naming it. It's also the reason that CP/M doesn't have sub-directories.
Reference: Chuck Guzis from VCF

Advent TurboROM

Finding bad blocks is done within the formatting process with ADVFMT, see above.

Kaypro

Very simple, just run PUTSYS and then PUTOVL.

1. PUTSYS = write the CP/M system tracks
2. PUTOVL = write overlays for the graphics

Advent TurboROM

Generating and writing the system tracks is done with TURBOGEN.

Once again the warning: Do not use the following original utilities with Advent TurboROM!

• PUTSYS.COM, PUTOVL.COM
• FORMAT06, FMT305.COM
• FORMAT.COM, K10HDFMT

All you need to do now is copy all the programs from the floppy disk (A:) to the hard disk (B:) and restart the Kaypro 10 with no floppy disk inserted.

A> PIP B: = A: * . * [OV]

After reboot, drives A: & B: are the two hard disks and C: is the floppy disk. That's all.

Here you will find all my gathered information about the CP/M Kaypro's.

In the depths of the internet I found a nice article (DE) about rescuing a Kaypro 10. In the original this text was of course written with Wordstar 3.3. I read and exported the file with Word 6.0 (Windows 3.1), then transferred it to my iMac, imported it with Openoffice and saved it as a pdf file.

This article is from the transition phase from CP/M to DOS, probably in the early 80's. Simply nice to read. It is a strange feeling, considering that this text was written about 40 years ago. What did you do back then?

• pdf
• doc (Word 6.0
• txt (Wordstar 3.3)

Advent TurboROM - Plu*Perfect

• Manual (1986)

1. (↑) The Kaypro 10 User's Guide, 1983, page 47

--> Go to Part 0 : Information
--> Go to Part 1 : Versions
--> Go to Part 2 : Hardware
--> Go to Part 3 : 8K EPROM Modification
--> Go to Part 4 : Formatting a Hard Disk
--> Go to Part 5 : USER areas
--> Go to Part 6 : MASMENU - Master Menu
--> Go to Part 7 : Terminal
--> Go to Part 8 : KayPLUS ROM
--> Go to Part 9 : Advent TurboROM
--> Go to Part 10: Multicopy Plu*Perfect
--> Go to Part 11: The Kay Family & Company
--> Go to Part 12: Kaypro Design Views
--> Go to Part 13: Micro Cornucopia
--> Go to Part 14: Repairing a Kaypro II
--> Go to Part 15: Kaypro Collections
--> Go to Part 16: Kaypro General
--> Go to Part 17: Kaypro Robie
--> Go to Part 18: MFM-Emulators
--> Go to Part 19: Roadrunner ROM
--> Go to Part 20: Software
--> Go to Part 21: FAQ
--> Go to Part 22: Kaypro Virtual
--> Go to Part 23: Formatting a Floppy Disk
--> Go to Part 24: ROM, EPROM
--> Go to Part 25: Kaycomp