How to align a 5.25" floppy drive!

[@007mercucio]

amazed and impressed you are still in touch with this lost art. wow.

[@adilsonqueiroz8391]

One question: If a drive can read a few floppy OK, does it mean that the other floppies are defective? Many of my old floppies make a lot of noise and others it says that they have bad sectors, others dont read nothing at all.

[@TheMajorTechie]

Potentially! One issue with a lot of older floppies at this point is that they may suffer from "bit rot", where the magnetic field on the actual disk itself has begun to fade beyond readability.

[@JimLeonard]

Quad-density drives were definitely not standard; I have them in my AT&T 6300/Olivetti M24/Xerox 6060 systems, but it was really cool back then to store 720K per disk -- but I never used it, since it borked compatibility with my DOS disks. Thanks for the calibration video!

[@TheMajorTechie]

Yup! I've found that on some PCs, you can set them in BIOS to be 720k 3.5" drives, and then DOS will be able to use them just fine!

[@opentheskyy7]

Hi! When can I buy such Drive Alignment Disk ? (00:33) I have to replace (double-side) head in Atari XF551.

[@TheMajorTechie]

If you have a working drive, you can make one using ImageDisk! If not, then your best bet is to search Ebay for something that might work. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=alignment+diskette&_sacat=0

[@piotrkaczorowski8327]

@@TheMajorTechie thank you!

[@xrbr]

Hello, do you have a solution to fix when the head is damaging the floppy? My discs are getting scratched to the point of removing the substrate.

[@TheMajorTechie]

oh man. see if cleaning the heads will do any good. if not then the heads are likely damaged beyond repair.

[@xrbr]

@@TheMajorTechie this is so sad... but thanks for replying.

[@mertuckan]

can you show how to align 3.5 drives too? that would be as useful

[@TheMajorTechie]

I'll see what I can do!

[@shadman6167]

Hello Dave, I have acquired lately a PANASONIC JU-475-5 DISK DRIVE 5.25" 1.2MB for which i am trying to align the heads. I don't have an alignment diskette, so I chose one of my 5.25" 360K diskettes and did the alignment procedure using IMD119. After that, I noticed that some of the floppies can be read while others fail to read. I guess this is due to the fact that they are formatted on other drives, right ? And the for all floppy diskettes to work on my Panasonic, I must align the heads using a special alignment diskette ? Any idea from where I can buy one ?

[@TheMajorTechie]

Not that I know of, sorry. (I'm not Dave btw)

[@shadman6167]

@@TheMajorTechie sorry got confused ! Anyhow, the only way to fix the drive is to align it using a special diskette ?

[@TheMajorTechie]

@@shadman6167 alignment diskettes are factory-written with special equipment rather than consumer drives, so they tend to be the most accurate alignment-wise out of any disks. unfortunately, because of their rarity and the way they're made, to my knowledge it's impossible to make them yourself. i'd recommend continuing to try alignment using IMD and consumer software disks. keep an eye out for alignment disks on ebay as well. they should be ones that make reference to a "cat's eye" signal (or similar) because they perform their alignment by having the technician watch for a very specific pattern to show up on an oscilloscope.

[@shadman6167]

​@@TheMajorTechie Hello, I just got a brand new factory DOS formatted 1.2MB Diskette which i about to use to align the Panasonic 475-5 disk drive 1.2MB. Just a reminder, the drive is also brand new but I messed up with the top head by unscrewing it and removing it completely that was 2 months ago. Now I tried to align the heads with IMD using the new diskette but i am facing the following problem: - After selecting the drive and pressing enter to proceed with alignment, the disk is not detected as I get a '?' all the way on single step. - If i press the cursor once to move the head by 1 track and press 'A' to analyze or D" to read data, I still get a '?'. - if i press the cursor one more time to move the head to track 2, the data is read and it detects 500K DD 15x512. - if I try the same using Double Step, it works when i press the cursor once to move the head. What could be wrong ? why isn't it reading data on track zero ? I noticed that H0 is out of alignment even though i didn't touch it. So I aligned both heads successfully but when i try to access the drive from DOS, it says general failure reading... Also when run IMD again, the drive is out of alignment. I don' get it ! I have another functional Panasonic 475-5 Disk Drive and it read the diskette correctly.

[@TheMajorTechie]

@shadman6167 are the heads on the mon aligned drive clean? If not then clean them off with some isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab. Beyond that I'm not entirely sure why it still won't read disks aside from maybe not being as well aligned as it seems to be or hardware failure.