Tech Talk: Early 90s-Style Servicing

Hope everyone is doing well in 2026, first of all.

While there’s still not a whole lot I can readily publicize just yet regarding my consulting positions, I’ll start off the year’s blog posts with one of my side passions of music technology.

Granted, it was partly in light of one of said gigs, but regardless, I was driven to revisit my Kurzweil K2000RS the past month, no thanks to having destroyed its floppy drive due to a disassembly mishap while setting up a Greaseweazle. The easy solution would’ve been to get a new floppy drive, but the problem there is that even if floppies were still the de-facto standard for file storage, different drives cooperate with different machines differently, meaning it could be a hardware compatibility headache if I ordered the wrong replacement.

So, instead, I began my venture into the ZuluSCSI technology that is being promoted lately by some hardware sampler enthusiasts. The most luck I had in the past was with a CompactFlash setup someone else assembled, but fortunately, I did have some SD card experience already thanks to my Synclavier Regen requiring them for external sample storage.

The frustrating part by far was the assembly: even the drive I ordered, while it comes with specific documentation, left me slightly confused how to install the drive in the fold one’s mount. In addition, the K2000RS includes two different sets of cables for internal storage, and which set is used depends on whether the chosen storage medium is a floppy disk or something that is on the SCSI bus. Fortunately, the SCSI configuration for the SD card was handled by the seller, but I did need to remember to abandon the floppy-specific cables inside the unit.

In the end, the ZuluSCSI installation worked, as shown in the image above, so now there’s no gaping hole in my unit, with the bonus of far more storage possible at once than 1.44 MB, though I did have a scare regarding boot failures up until yesterday. Turned out that problem was the byproduct of needing to upgrade the OS in order to get ZuluSCSI to work: somehow I had failed to seat the new firmware EPROM’s in all the way. Silver lining about this mishap is that no crucial data was lost for me in the process, and that the capacitors in the unit were not the culprit this time despite generating similar symptoms.

I did end up using this synth a little bit now, and though I have to experiment with the sounds the seller was generous enough to include with my order, I do hope to fully harness it soon enough, no thanks to the position I need it for.

Hopefully I can fully disclose one of my two positions by my next blog post next month, but in the meantime, thanks everyone for reading, and happy New Year again!