wanttaja@ssc-vax.UUCP (Ronald J Wanttaja) (08/30/84)
I had an unusual anomaly with my 1541 recently. I was running along, fat, dumb, and happy with it, until I sent a program in to a software publisher. He called me a few days later and said the disk had a read error, and they could't read it on any of their drives, including a 4040. I immediately checked my drive, and it seemed OK. I was able to load commercial software, old disks I had written to, and it passed the performance check OK. I assumed the disk had been garbaged in transit, and fired off another one, express mail. Same problem... they had 4 C-64/1541 combinations in office, and my disk wouldn't load on any of them (I have sent may disks to them in the past, without problem). They finally were able to make a copy by using the 4040 from drive 1 to drive 0, the reverse of usual practice. It seemed obvious at that point that my drive was out of allignment, especially after a friend couldn't load one of my disks either. I still had no problem using the drive; it saved and loaded just fine. If allignment is off, I can see still being able to load my own programs, but it still loaded commercial software just fine. So I bit the bullet and bought a second 1541 (I have deadlines to meet). Bought it at a good price, $225 plus tax. Guess what? The new 1541 has no problems reading disks from my old, "misalligned", disk drive. It might be going out of allignment when it gets warm, but I typically make the mailing copy right after turning the drive on. I copy the disks the hard way- load the program, switch disks, save the program- so there is no copier at fault. In any case, I am somewhat impressed at the new 1541. It is quieter than my old one, expecially when it slams the head against the stop when a disk is formated. The old LED status lights now have professional-looking bezels, and the new disk clamp system seems a lot sturdier and doesn't give me the feeling the machine is going to swallow the disk and not give it back. Ron Wanttaja (ssc-vax!wanttaja)