HP-1000 Minicomputer System (w/DEC RL02) Guidance

It possibly is, but the modifications to the drive would be quite major. The main problem is makign that bsolute opostion sensor that is accrate enough and stae enough to be sueable. I belive the origianl factory formatting set-uy used some kid of interferometer. I am not susre you need a wider head. The servo bursts are offset from the data tracks, but may well eb the same width (if anything, they'd be narrower, I think). As an asaide, I did like a methrd used for one of the HP drives which had fixed and remvoeable platters. It was possible to rewrite the servo infroamtion o nthe fixed platter in the field. What you did was to use soem special electroncis (and head?) to take the positioning infroamtion form the servo surface of the removable pack, and then wrtie the servo pattern o nthe approrpate sruface of the fixed disk pack. I have never seen the setup to do this, though. FWIW, given a servo-tracked drive it is normally possible to fairly accrately offset the haeds from the position where the servo thinks they should be. The RK07 made ths a user feature (one of the cotnroller registers can set an offstr) to recover mis-recorded disk packs IIRC I have this vision of a modified RL02 drive with the platter from a dismantled pack on the same spidnle and the normal pack and 4 heads o nthe positioner. The 2 on the now-fixed paltter are used for positioning, you can then use the heads on the removeable pack can write servo signals, etc. -tony