Help aligning Kaypro disk drives?

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Fri May 22 18:37:47 1998

On Fri, 22 May 1998, D. Peschel wrote:

> A while ago I got a Kaypro 4'84 system for free and have been trying to bring
> it back to a state of stability and usefulness. The system as a whole was in
> good shape; my problems have been with the disk drives.
>
> I had hoped it was "only" old, worn-out disks that were causing the problem
> (and the disks are worn-out, as tests with 22DISK on a school PC show) but the
> drives themselves seem to be flaky. (Either that, or the new Verbatim disks
> I bought are substandard.) My worst fear is that the drives are corrupting the
> disks somehow. (Can this happen even when no writing is involved?)

Remotely possible, but not likely.
 
> I have two spare drives; one is evidently SSDD and the other is DSDD -- I have
> not tested them. Only the DSDD drive is really suitable. These are, IIRC,
> 96-tpi MFM drives. They are made by TEC. (Not the same as TEAC, I suppose.)

With your PRO-884 MAX ROM, you should be able to install and use the 96-tpi
drive and it should double step and read your 48-tpi disks. As a general
rule, however, it is not wise to write to a disk that has been formatted
in a 48-tpi drive.

> I would just put one in, except that I'm not sure if I need to do anything to
> align them. Even if I did need to, I undoubtedly don't have the equipment.
> Is alignment really important? What about on new drives?

Alignment is somewhat important, but only critical if you are moving
disks between different machines. Since you were able to read the disks
that I sent you, I would presume that they are not all that far out.
 
> Could cleanliness be a problem? (I cleaned the heads with a head-cleaning kit
> a while ago; I put the dust cover on the computer for some time but stopped;
> however, the keyboard latches in front of the drives anyway. I keep the doors
> closed and the shipping inserts in the drives; I definitely have been careless
> about the order of inserting/removing the inserts and opening/closing the
> drives and turning on/off the computer.)

Your 'keep clean' precautions are overkill unless you live in the midst
of a dustbowl. While it is always wise to eject the disk before
shutdown, I have not lost a disk that way in years on any of the various
machines that I use - CP/M and DOS.
 
> It's very unsettling to think of my software eroding as I watch. I haven't
> found replacements for some of it. I've tried using 22DISK; there are two
> problems with this: 1) It doesn't like my formats very much, and 2) I've been
> using PC's in the computer lab and I don't trust those drives any more than
> mine! I may haul an ex-roommate's Korean '386 box out of the closet if I get
> desperate.

Sydex' 22DISK is quite capable of handling the Kaypro formats without
problem. It may be, as you suggest, that the drives on the lab machines
are the problem. If possible, I would suggest booting to DOS rather than
running in a DOS window when you run 22DISK, though.
 
> The Apple ][ disk drives I've seen have had flawless performance; even PC 5.25"
> drives seem to do very well. I'm getting very tired of hearing my machine
> go "grkgrkgrkgrk ... grkgrkgrkgrk ... grkgrkgrkgrk ..." (It's one of those
> sounds that is instantly annoying and recognizable by pure instinct as a Very
> Bad Sound. I wonder what a list of those sounds would look like?)

I'm not sure, but I think that it has to be terminated with something like:

        AAAAARRRRGGHH!!! Oh, _at_&%$!!!!

                                                 - don
> Thanks,
>
> -- Derek
>
Received on Fri May 22 1998 - 18:37:47 BST