Did I realign my floppy drive head, or am I being overly optimistic?

[mooseman]

Okay, so you know how you're not supposed to completely disassemble a Mac floppy drive because it messes up the head alignment? Yeah, so I read that *after* I disassembled and lubed the drive. Oops.

Anyway, I think I've got it re-aligned now, but it seems to have been suspiciously easy to do so is there any way to make absolutely sure? This was a Sony SuperDrive out of a 7300. What I did:

- Moved the zero track sensor all the way to the rear, left the screw slightly loose
- Inserted a factory 1.44MB floppy, the drive couldn't read it
- Ejected the floppy, moved the ZTS very slightly forward, reinserted the floppy
- Repeated this a bunch of times until the disk mounted

Now I had a disk that would mount, but I would get errors opening any files. To dial it in I slightly loosened the two screws on the stepper motor and rotated it a tiny amount at a time. In one direction the disk would no longer mount at all, so I went the other direction. Eventually I found a point where all the files would open and then I locked it down.

It seems to be reading disks fine now. I also used Disk Copy to image the floppy and that completed as well without errors.

This only took me about fifteen minutes so after reading the horror stories I'm a bit suspicious that maybe I missed something, though. Anything else I should be testing here or am I good?

 

[Big Ben]

Hello,

Head alignment is a bit different (it’s about how the head is oriented), you have dealt with track alignment which is fastidious but easier.

I made this mistake few times, some drives can’t be disassembled without messing with the zero track detector, I did clean my 6100 floppy drive and got lucky it epoxy sealing forced the screw back into their original position.

Overall I think you nailed it, the last test you can do is making a floppy (formatting + write data to it) and try to read it in a known working drive.

 

[mooseman]

Ah, cool, thanks for correcting my terminology.

Okay, will do some more testing but it sounds like I was good and/or lucky on the track alignment, thanks.