Interesting drive failure...

[David Gesswein]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 10:54:42PM -0700, Josh Dersch wrote:
> 
> So, I suppose this is somewhat good news in that I may be able to
> use the drive, but I wonder what would cause the data on the disk to
> fail in such a manner (and I'm still hesitant to reformat the drive
> without recovering stuff off of surfaces 2/3...)  Any thoughts?
> 
Head alignment off on those heads. Can the drive microstep or any other
way to change the head alignement? You might be able to recover the
data that way.

I have seen an MFM drive with a few heads so out of alighment that
you got data from track n+1 on one head and n on another. Not sure
how you cause that without more serious damage to the drive. For MFM
drives orientation or finger on the stepper motor helps to recover
data when the heads are off. Probably doesn't work with your drive.