top 8 pads are dead?

Hey guys, I'm new to this forum and I did search first, so if I missed it, forgive me.....

My homeboy brought over a 2000xl with a whack floppy drive. I replaced that with a zip250 and I added 16mb of ram. It's now running like a champ and I made my first MPC beat last night (been making beats on PC's for years, but never MPC's)

anyways, the top two rows of pads are totally dead, they don't trigger any samples, letters when naming files, or anything. I checked the connection, ribbon cable looks good, no broken traces.... what should I check next?

I will check that when I get home from work, but from what I remember, it was glued pretty securely, It took a lot of effort to peel the top corner, then I stopped because I figured that was not the problem. Will check again though. Thanks.

Take a look at the contacts on the ribbon cable where it goes into the connector-- sometime these oxidize and not let it make a good connection. You can clean these with rubbing alcohol to try and take off any tarnish.

Also tale off the rubber pads and push onto the sensors with your fingers. Do any of the pads work this way?

all contacts are clean (they already were, but then I cleaned them myself just to be sure) there are no broken traces. The sensors are are securely glued. It's got to be something else, some kind of electronic component failure... anyone have any more suggestions? I don't really know how to read schematics so well, but I can desolder/solder caps and resistors if someone could tell me which ones to check...

check the connectors first if they are good and secured its the sensors. event though the traces look good it doesnt mean that they are, i see this all the time and ive repaired about 20 mpc (all of models except the 4000 and 5000). if you need me to look at it send it over.

I've checked the connectors, is there a way I can be sure it's not something further down the chain, such as shorting out the pins at the connector to see if that triggers a press (like taking the sensors out of the equation)?

take out the sensor plate, take off all the stickers near the connector. using a multi meter, check for continuity of each trace.

Thanks, that sounds so obvious, I feel dumb..... I appreciate it though!