Argh! Powering up a devive (any device, but demountable hard disks are one of the worst) is the last thing you should do. And in the case of such a drive, I'd run the motors for at least 10 miuntes with the heads prevented from loading (e.g. with the voice coil disconnected from the servo amplifer) to 'purge' the air ducts, etc. Presumably you have a head crash. And the drive can't find the servo information, so it retracts the heads. I've never seen this drive, but I have done head replacements on demountable hard disks. It's not too difficult (not much worse than doing a floppy drive). Of course you need the new heads. YEs, there's an alignment procedure. You generally have a special disk pack that you put n, then connect a 'scope to the outputs of the read preamplifier, and adjust the head position for even lobes of the catseye pattern. Just like a floppy drive in fact. Again the problem is getting the alignment pack. If you put good heads in, and they fly, you should be able to format/read/write a scratch disk, even before you do the alignment. I'd not put an alignment pack anywhere near a drive that didn't do that. -tony