On Apr 29, 2008, at 3:32 PM, Mark Tapley wrote: Well, I spent a fair amount of time on it, and I can't say I have all the answers, but I had enough drives that I could experiment a bit. I found that in general, the interface board on the top of the drives doesn't fail, but the board internally can suffer from dry joints, so reflowing the solder, looking for whiskers etc. will generally get the drives to the point where they will spin up and seek. The other thing I found was the linear optical encoder often got clogged and that you had to reset the read/write head properly for the drive to work. Apart to calibrate the drive. I have no service manual, so I don't know exactly how they work and haven't had time for continuous experimentation. I have a fair number of drives, and was able to repair 2 successfully.