My expeirience is that if you have a drive with a
correctly-aligned
positioner/head assemly, you can remove it as an assembly, and put it
back in _the same drive_ and it will still be alighed. But if you move
positioenrs between drives you have to do a realignment.
In my case unfortunately that would not be the case as the best I can find
are two other units in unknown condition from a completely different set of
drives.
The RK05 can format a completley blank pack, there is no servo
information, or anything like that to worry about. If the heads are
slighlty misaligned (as they will be if you just drop in a positiioner),
the drive will he able to read/write packs that haev been formatted on
that drive, but you won't be able to interchange them with other drives.
But at least you can test the drives before doing an alignment (in fact
you _must_ do this, you want ot be sure the heads will fly and not crash
before putting a rate alignment pack into the drive).
I can easily get hold of a scope but a calibration
pack is a different
story.
They are not easy to find. The good news is that companies other than DEC
made compatible drives (the RK05 was y no means the first!) and that the
alignment packs for these will do for an RK05 too. I am told you can even
use the alignnment pack from a low-density dirve (RK02-compatible) if you
stick a little bit of shim in the centre hole of the hu. THe details are
in one of the DEC maintenance manuals.
-tony