Steve. This dead spot problem is exactly the same problem Tony and i have been grappling with for the past couple of months! Check past posts on thiz forum. Despite lots of tests, replacements and disassemblies we never got to the bottom of it. In the end i sourced a replacement drive. On 6/04/2011 11:14 AM, "Steven Hirsch" <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote: On Tue, 5 Apr 2011, Mr Ian Primus wrote: The diskette drive was throwing a lot of read errors and making a lot of friction noise. On a hunch, I moved the pressure-pad tension spring to a lower setting (closer to the pivot). Then, I put in the MacWorks diskette. It chunked away for a while, emitted a beep and spat it out. The Macintosh "insert diskette" icon was on screen :-). Put in the Mac System diskette and it loaded to the desktop. Turns out that LisaTest 3.0 will NOT run in 512k, which might be a good data point for others in the this situation down the road. I found an AST RamStack 1M board in the other machine and put that in the second memory slot. ListTest booted without a problem and is busy testing memory as this is written. One serious issue with the diskette drive: It has one or more "dead" spots in its rotation. If it stops at such a point it fails to spin up again at the next access. When it spits the diskette out with an error, I give the spindle a small push with a screwdriver, reinsert and it picks up from that point. Hopefully folks have some sage advice for dealing with dead spots? It's not related to the excess pressure on the head - it doesn't even try to spin. There's absolutely no sound or activity. Steve --