blumberg@ihuxw.UUCP (Marc R Blumberg) (08/21/84)
Could someone explain how to tell if your 1541 disk drive is out of alignment? I have seen several articles on the subject, but not having experienced any problems with my 1541 for over a year and a half (that's right, a year and a half) I've ignored said articles. Last night I had trouble booting Infocom's ENCHANTER(tm), a game which depends rather heavily on loading individual disk sectors. If I could get the game going at all, it had trouble recognizing normal commands. At one point, thanks to data mutilation, I was permanently teleported to the room " zxl" and was stuck there. (NOTE to non-ENCHANTER players: there IS no such room in the game. I tried other disks, and experienced similar problems. Do I have to have my drive re-aligned? Can I do it myself? Any help would be appreciated. Please reply by mail, Thanks in advance. Marc Blumberg AT&T Technologies, Inc. Naperville, IL ihnp4!ihuxw!blumberg
ericksen@unc.UUCP (James P. Ericksen) (08/24/84)
When our 1541 began to exhibit those symptoms --- problems with loading, disks that spun forever without doing anything --- we too were afraid that it was time to shell out whatever it would cost us to get the drive re-aligned. But as a last-ditch effort we tried one of those $7.95 disk drive cleaners, and lo and behold, our drive has worked perfectly ever since! (Well, at least it works until it overheats, but that's another matter.) The moral of the story: try cleaning your drive head; it may be all you need. Jim (and Helen) Ericksen