First post, by Alesia
Hello again, I had the opportunity to pick up a Kaypro 10 locally and I'm trying to get around to troubleshooting it's issues. However I'm really only familiar with 286 and later machines so I could use some guidance of where to look so to speak.
The good news is the Kaypro powers on and the screen can draw it's entire area, evidenced by the flash of markings it makes when the computer is reset. The keyboard also makes ticking sounds when keys are pressed, and the caps lock light illuminates (and never shuts off) so that is working in some capacity.
The bad news is that the Kaypro powers on to a blinking cursor with no splash, beeps, errors, no splash screen, ect and stays there. There is no hard drive activity (I'm assuming it's bad or seized) at any point, however the floppy drive becomes active after a second and never stops running, disks can not be inserted fully either without force. I imaged a CP/M system disk out of curiosity to see if it would read it and got nothing, so no dice there. I did find a capacitor (can see it in one of the below photos) that had it's legs crossed/touching so I straightened that out gently to see if that made a difference and nada.
Aside from the system disk and capacitor, I tried unplugging the data inputs to the system board to see if it would give me any kind of error and that resulted in the same blinking cursor as well. I tried digging around in whatever old troubleshooting threads I could find on google plus the manual and didn't see anything similar to what I am dealing with. If anyone has any idea of where I should be looking, I would appreciate any ideas. Please excuse the dust in the attached photos, I've not gotten in enough to clean the boards and have just been trying to get any signs of function out of the computer. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I'm very out of my wheel house with this computer.