Desperately need help with Kaypro disk near Columbus, Ohio

[EvanK]

Got this message today; a guy in the Columbus, Ohio area needs help reading his father's will which was made 20 years ago on a Kaypro 2x.

Do not contact me, contact the guy directly at gpgammon@sbcglobal.net.

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Hi Evan -

I got your name from David Weil at the Computer Museum of America in San Diego. I have a unique situation and he suggested you may be able to help or provide some direction. I would appreciate any assistance. Here it is, briefly:

I have a 5.25" DS/DD diskette that contains my deceased father's will (he died in April). It was created on a Kaypro 2x in 1986. I am desperately trying to locate a Kaypro 2x that will read the diskette. I have the Kaypro that it was written on in my possession, and I have had no luck in reading the diskette - I have a CP/M diskette for a Kaypro 2, and each time I put it in Drive A:, the message "No operating system is present on this disk" appears. I have tried swapping Drive A: and Drive B: - no luck. I have tried reading the diskette using a DD drive hooked up to a PC running Windows - no luck. The only success I have had is using EnCase Forensic software to read the data sector by sector. Of course, that produces unformatted text, so it hasn't been helpful.

Any thoughts? If you would like, I would be willing to call you to discuss this over the phone.

Thank you.
Greg Gammon
Westerville, OH

[Erik]

My 2x is in storage or I'd offer it up to help out.

I've got a later KayPro that might work, but there are no guarantees.

Hopefully someone local to him has a working machine to assist with.

Erik

[Terry Yager]

I shot him an email.

More'n likely, just reading the disk won't be enough. The file was probably written using Perfect Writer or WordStar, so it'll have to be converted to ASCII before it can be read.

--T

[mryon]

what are the chances of dumping the disk to an image and working on it in an emulator?

[Terry Yager]

what are the chances of dumping the disk to an image and working on it in an emulator?

Even with an emulator, you need some way to read the original disk format, and a copy of the word processor to run under the emu and convert the file to ASCII or some other WP format.

I suggested using 22DISK to read the disk & copy it to DOS format, then another DOS-based program to convert the WP files to ASCII.

--T

[carlsson]

In terms of law, is a will effective if it only exists in digital form?

[Terry Yager]

In terms of law, is a will effective if it only exists in digital form?

I think it has to have an original signature to be considered valid. Might even have to be notarized, but I'm not sure.

--T

[ahm]

That floppy is probably a data disk, meant for the B: drive, while the A: drive would have had a bootable word processor disk in it. I wonder if there are any other diskettes with the machine. If so, we might use 22DISK to extract the word processing program and run that in an emulator like MYZ80 and ultimately read or print the will.

(Now, I wonder how anyone can know whether this is the person's final will, and not one of any number of working copies.)