konc wrote:McBierle wrote:
Well as Jed118 said i'll have to try and try and try 😀
I'll assume you've never done this before. Unless you use something like Dave Dunfield's Imagedisk and a factory-produced floppy you'll have a very, very hard time. In fact I can't imagine anyone succeeding by randomly moving the heads, plus how were you planning to assess alignment?
I rebuild carburettors and do other very fine work - generally I am decently skilled in aspects of precision. All you have to do is look at my glorious mirror IDE cable! 😜 (Hey, it worked first try!)
The way I did it is once I could read a DD disk, I would keep one side of the head semi-firmly screwed down, and move the other side in intervals from top down, in a circular way (kind of like shifting a manual trans car or calibrating a joystick). I remembered the range of successful reads from a DD, then switched to HD, and repeated my pattern until I fell out of range. Once those could read, I re-did the process (ever so carefully - I had to resort to DD diskettes more than once because of shaky hands - glass of wine helped there 😉 ) until I could format a diskette properly. Then that diskette went into several other machines for testing - read, write, format, - then back into the LTE to be read. I continued adjusting until I got no errors. The whole process took about an hour. This was all because I had to change a band.
Maybe I just got lucky - I had nothing but time in a snowstorm at a cottage 😁
What would be the right way to calibrate the heads? I got the idea from fiddling with a 1542 Commodore drive, which I will admit is much more tolerant of shift.
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