jdh@qubix.UUCP (John Hallesy) (08/08/83)
2 months ago my 1541 died (it no longer read track 1), and I took it in to
the local Commodore service center in Santa Clara, CA. They gave me a replace-
ment drive since I had about 5 days left on the 90 day warranty, and gave the
replacement drive a 30 day extension. Well OF COURSE the drive waited until
this warranty had expired before giving the familiar warning signs of a failing
read/write head alignment. It now intermittantly reads bad sectors and
checksums, and may get progressively worse. That's exactly what happened to
my first drive before it finally failed the disk performance test.
Commodore's policy on the matter is to charge you $85.00 for swapping your
drive with a new one (new 30 day warranty), or to charge you $55.00/hour to
fix your bad drive (30 day warranty on the repair).
Since they were out of swappable drives, I'm going to bring my drive back
home & try a disk head cleaner & hope that it's just a dirty or magnetized head.
However, its probably a badly aligned read/write head, & I won't be able to fix
it without the appropriate disk tuner & oscilloscope capable of displaying the
hysteresis curve.
An interesting side note: the technician with whom I talked owns a 1541 and
has had the "disk spins after the computer turns off" problem too. He seems to
think that his 6522 VIA chip is going bad & may be sensitive to voltage transi-
ents.
MORAL: If you buy a 1541, BURN IT IN!!! Run your disk performance test
over and over, & try to get it to crap out BEFORE your warranty
runs out. Otherwise you're looking at an expensive repair bill.
About to get a 4040 dual drive & IEEE 488 bus,
John Hallesy
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