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Realigning 400K floppy Drives

NeXT

NeXT

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Joined
Oct 22, 2008
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Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I have a friend who has a drawer full of the Sony 400K drives that are "junk" because they've all had the track 0 photo interrupter tweaked. He says there's nothing you can do after that's been meddled with because there is no utility for the mac to realign a drive and without doing extensive googling it seems correct as I've never come across anything either. Are we both overlooking a utility or tool that people use to realign the heads?
 
Depending on the drive, I know Sony had some special hardware that connected to the SMC-70 to repair their first SSDD and DSDD drives. I've never seen the software or the hardware outside of a manual.
 
looking st thst guys listing. thst floply drive has the same adjustment tab (where he uses a flatblade toadjust) as the epson single height 5.25" drives on some of the kaypro computers.
 
There is a utility for macintoshs that might help, if you have an older 512k/se lying round ...

Sony Disk Interface Test

System Software (0-6) Pre-Release

In 1984 Apple Computer unveiled their Macintosh. It included a new user interface that revolutionized the way people though about computer interaction. Originally referred to as simply "Macintosh System", the underlying OS was a single-tasking disk system for the Motorola 68K CPU. Significant...
winworldpc.com
 
I realigned mine (in my 512k) without any utilities. I loosened the screw, moved the sensor back just a hair, and it’s been fine ever since. I think any drive could be realigned with enough fiddling.
 
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Never worked on a Macintosh floppy drive, but just screwing around with PC floppy drives, I've found just adjusting things until the drive can scan through all sectors on a known good (never written to) factory mastered disk with no retries, and write a disk that is similarly readable with no retries on a known good drive - is often "good enough".

I am not familiar with any Macintosh tool for just scanning all sectors on a 400k/800k drive, although there should be something out there. Norton Utilities for Macintosh comes to mind, but I seem to recall that doesn't like the early file systems found on 400k disks.
 
I did the same with my 400k on my Lisa. I spent hours in confusion because I could read a disk from another drive, partially, but not write and have it read. I literally just kept adjusting the head and such until I got lucky and it worked. And it's been fine since. Pure luck I suppose.
 
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