Date   : Thu, 20 Mar 1986 16:52:57 GMT
From   : Richard A Childers <tyger%well.uucp@BRL.ARPA>
Subject: Shugart Disk Drive Alignment

Hello, all, a question for those with knowledge and a willingness towards
sharing it :

I have an old CP/M machine with the traditional Z80 and 64 kb RAM, and two
floppy disk drives, Shugart 801's ... 8", SS/DD.

These drives are, over the ages, becoming less and less reliable. So far as
I can tell, it's not a matter of hardware errors or anything, really, but
I continually get these little TRAC errors. ( Which means that the head is
not reading the track correctly, I believe. )

Now, from what I've read, it's quite common for your heads to drift from
the original alignment, and it's a relatively small matter to re-align them
if you have the appropriate devices to support your effort.

An oscilloscope, I have access to. What I need, I think, is a master disk,
a metal diskette with master tracks, made out of metal, instead of floppy
material - a hardware reference point by which the disk heads are aligned.
The standard 77 track, 8 inch, single density IBM 3740/1D format for which
these drives were made for.

I haven't really made a serious effort to look around for this, yet. I have
reason to believe (a) that they are generally unavailable in all the best
shops, as Shugart drives are basically as obsolete as skeleton keys, and
(b) that the drive manufacturers made these special alignment disks mostly
unavailable for the general public, to facilitate the existence of small
repair shops and discourage people from doing their own maintenance.

Does anyone out there in net.land have any ideas on where I might find such
a metallic master alignment diskette ? I'd be greatly appreciative, and so
would thousands of others with similiar problems, since the 8" diskette is
not yet dead, I suspect, and there must be others with a similiar problem ...

Thanks, awfully, lads and ladies ...

-- richard

-- 

"The way to do is to be."  -- Lao Tzu  ...  circa 500 B C  ...

..{dual,glacier,hplabs}!well!tyger    aka   Richard A Childers