| Author: | Anubis (registered user: 12 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sat, Jun 06th, 2009 @ 06:07 ( . ) |
I was hoping that I lucked out and got a super sturdy drive, but while nibbing some disks, my drive got out of alignment. I super cleaned the head, greased the rails, etc. Still nothing. I got a hold of an ALPS service disk, but it's just a copy of the .prg, and I have read online that copies of alignment disks are fair at best. It says to put in a reference disk #97....? It also calls for the use of an oscilliscope, which I don't have (unfortunately). Luckily, I swapped my parallel modded board into another newer (Mitsumi) drive. This is working, but from the amount of disks I still have to do, I really need to figure out how to align my drive correctly. I've read several articles online, but they vary in scope a lot. Any tips on how keep my drives healthy? One more question: Is the 1541-II more reliable? I have a couple of those, and the mod looks pretty easy for the cable. I even found a couple of 40 pin IC sockets so that I could do a fancy job installing the parallel cable. |
 | Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sat, Jun 06th, 2009 @ 10:08 ( . ) |
The older pull-down drives are terrible for alignment- I have a half dozen of them and they are all like that. Fortunately, about 90% of my twist drives are fine. I have two twist 1541's that I've imaged thousands of disks with and never gone out of alignment- they are reliable. |
| Author: | Anubis (registered user: 12 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Jun 07th, 2009 @ 11:33 ( . ) |
Sounds like good news ! The online consensus is that the 1541-II rarely goes out of alignment, so I'm still considering putting a parallel cable on one of those as well. I did manage to get the ALPS drive working. I took it completely apart, cleaned and lubed the rails, motor, etc. but the big thing that probably fixed it was the screw on the stepper motor head that holds the metal belt in place was loose. I super tightened that and after a couple of search knocks and disk ID mismatch errors it started working fine. Anyway, I think that was a big part of the problem. Now the ALPS drive is working again, so I'll just ease up on using it as much. |
| Author: | Pete Rittwage (registered user: 558 posts ) |
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| Date: | Sun, Jun 07th, 2009 @ 11:39 ( . ) |
The 1541-II is a nice drive, but there are certain disks it cannot image (I'd have to go back and look at which, but I had a member a number of years ago that had trouble). If there are certain patterns of weak/bad GCR, the read circuit will get "stuck" and return all random GCR until it the read mode is turned off and back on again. Good news on the older drive, though. If it'll stay in alignment it'll be fine. |
 | Author: | Nate (guest: search) |
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| Date: | Sun, Jun 07th, 2009 @ 14:15 ( . ) |
I also have a twist-style 1541, short board. While the drive mechanics are reliable, some of the ROM issues with the short board are annoying. It's somewhat like a 1541-C |
| Author: | Anubis (registered user: 12 posts ) |
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| Date: | Mon, Jun 08th, 2009 @ 08:33 ( . ) |
Luckily for me, I pulled the long board from the alps drive and popped it onto the twist style 1541. I did this because I soldered my parallel cable to the underside of the board and I didn't want to redo the work at that point. I remember reading somewhere that the boards didn't care about what mechanical version was hooked up to them, since they mostly worked the same way |