On Nov 8, 19:32, Tony Duell wrote: I've had to do that too, and I tend to agree with Tony that the banging on the end stop seems to contribute to the need. However, I ought to point out that I've had to align lots of other 5.25" drives as well (I used to be a (micro)computer technician, a long time ago), including ones that used taut band mechanisms and leadscrews. aligning As does the Apple Service Manual for the Apple ][, as sold to all Apple Service Centres in the early '80s. It gives explicit instructions on head alignment, and board setup. I don't think I found Disk ][s to be much less reliable than contemporary drives, and mine are still going strong (both pairs). We all learned to open the door before power-up or power-down, but we had to do that with CBM drives and many others too. Certainly some brands of disk were better than others but that was true in the Commodore drives and the Cromemco drives, and later in the Acorn/BBC drives as well. Most of the time, they were on top of the machine, with the monitor on top of that, and I don't recall any problems that could be ascribed to that. The only catastrophic failures I can remember (apart from "Oh Spit! I meant to format the *other* disk!") were due to users replacing the cables wrongly. I think I've told this story before, but the Tech College used to loan Apples out to staff over the weekends. Typically the drives would be disconnected to make it easier to carry. It's easy to put that 20-pin ribbon header back, one pin along from its correct position on the controller, and if you do, you let a lot of magic white smoke out of the drive door. You can tell it's magic smoke, because the drive never has enough magic left to work after that. Usually the 74LS125 takes the brunt, but at least once it took out the MC3470 as well. That was "interesting" the first time, as Apple carried no spares, and the Motorola distributors claimed it didn't exist. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York