Tony Duell wrote: Seconded (for what it's worth) - that's my approach, and I've never damaged a drive that way either. Sometimes the hub area attracts crud and can use a clean too. Some drives are better than others when it comes to access to the heads... cheers Jules

In som,e cases the slide rails that the heads run on need clenaing too. It's wlaso worth cleaning the dust out of any optical sensorts (track 0, write protect). In the case of Sony 3.5" full-height drives, it's _essential_ to strip down the eject mechanism and clean off the hardened grease. Not doing this can cause hte upper head to get ripped off when you eject a disk! Not what hte OP was sksing, but quite often I totally strip down the drives in a newly-acquired machine and clean all the parts separtely. Only do this if you have the alignemtn disks and know how to use them!. A hint here is to assume the drive was aligned at the start, and mark the positions of the stepper motor, trakc 0 sensor, etc before taking them apart. Assuming the steper works, before dismanyling, use an exerciser to go to track 0 and measure the clearance between the head carriage and some bit of th chassis with feeler gauges. This is not accurate enough to avoid the need to do an alignment, but it will mean that when you put the CE disk in, you are close enough to see the pattern. -tony