floppy drive alignment procedure

[blanning]

Does someone have a link to a site or something that explains the procedure for aligning a floppy drive?

Those two roctec drives I got from ebay, I believe this is what's wrong with them.

brian

[wolfchild]

Warning:  what I'm going to tell you could be wrong... but here goes anyway...

Since misalignment is when the heads are not in line with each other, you should in theory be able to format a disk and read it back on a misaligned drive.  Such a disk won't work in other drives, but you should be able to read and write files to it on the same drive.

Maybe you can give it a quick try? Others could correct me if I'm wrong...

Edwin

[blanning]

This is how I remember it as well.  Of course, I'd prefer to read disks written on other drives. ;-)

brian

[weirdami]

I was thinking that, too. Works with old VCR's. I heard once that if you had old tapes recorded with a misaligned VCR head, that you should get those tapes re-recorded to a good VCR before fixing the misaligned one. Maybe the military should use funkified disk drives so the enemy thinks all the disks they keep espionaging are blank or something.  :idea:

[wolfchild]

This is how I remember it as well. Of course, I'd prefer to read disks written on other drives.  

LOL! Of course!  But being a technician myself, I usually do the troubleshooting before actually dismantling stuff.  I don't imagine alignment to be an easy thing to get right.

Cheers!
Edwin

[JimS]

I've done disk alignments, but it's been quite a few years ago now. The trick is that you need to know the proper test points for the drive mechanism involved. You also need the alignment program, which isn't much of a problem. But the killer is that you need a special disk with test patterns on it... this can't be written with a normal drive.

[Damion]

There is an excellent tool written by Thomas Richter for aligning floppy drives, works great. I can't recall the name, but it's on aminet (somewhere). If I remember the name I'll post it later, or try to dig it up on my A1200.

 

[blanning]

-D- wrote:
There is an excellent tool written by Thomas Richter for aligning floppy drives, works great. I can't recall the name, but it's on aminet (somewhere). If I remember the name I'll post it later, or try to dig it up on my A1200.

 

Please do.  thanks.

brian