At 04:05 PM 9/8/99 -0500, you wrote: Even if that's true, there should be no way that the drive will spin down with the heads still loaded. Even if the normal parking circuit fails, the underspeed detection should trigger the emergency retract. Check out that emergency retract circuit closely, it wasn't put there for nothing. It's proper operation is critical to the survival of the drive. The drives that I worked on had a wire-OR circuit with four diodes to monitor four conditions that would cause an emergency retract. Power fail (5V logic power, I think) and underspeed were two of the conditions. As a suggestion, do you have a scrap disk that you can take the platter off of and run the hub by itself? You could run it and watch what happens without worrying about damaging the heads. Tony is right, your voice coil sounds like it's ok since it will load the heads. You should be able to check it's ability to retract by pushing it further in and it should retract to it's correct position. It should react fast enough that you can't move it before it senses the error and returns to the correct position. If it moves and doesn't return then you have a problem. The drives often use + and - power supplies to supply power for seek and retract. You may have a bad power supply or it may have a bad transistor or whatever they use to switch the power to the voice coil. Attempting to force it past it normal position should detect such problems. Joe