Picked up a 1541 floppy drive on Ebay (Previous owner said it was reading/writing well) and am having a bit of trouble getting it to work. The box arrived and the poor little thing's front was smashed up a bit in shipping.

When I turn it on I hear the motor spin up and the red light turns on for a couple seconds, and then it settles down. When I give it the FORMAT command, I hear the motor spin up, and then after about a second it makes a clicking sound as if the heads smashing against the side for a couple seconds, stops (Motor still sounds as if its spinning for a few moments after), and then the red light flashes. The drive reports Error 21 "DISK READ ERROR".

Even though the floppy wasn't formatted, I tried giving it a load command to see what it would do, and it makes the same sound as it does with the FORMAT command and the Commodore says "?FILE NOT FOUND"

Would this be down to the heads being out of alignment from shipment? Or would it be down to something else? First time owning a 1541 so not sure how to proceed.

Thanks in advance!

Considering how little it takes to knock them out of alignment, poor handling in shipment could easily cause it. Was it even shipped with one of the cardboard inserts in the drive? How bad did the front actually get damaged?
_________________

There wasn't a cardboard insert or anything for that matter inside the unit when it arrived. The switch to hold the floppy in place had punched its way through the front of the box to give you an idea of the quality of the packaging. Superglued the bits back on that fell off. Heres some pictures of the damage:

(Sorry for the size)


http://sandvi.ch/1541-1.jpg
http://sandvi.ch/1541-2.jpg

Thanks for the assitance.

Using the handy programs from here: http://home.comcast.net/~safeh...html#align I've managed to get the little guy up and running again I moved it from track 1 to 35 a number of times and also told it to format after each. Looks like it knocked the head back into place. Reads and writes perfectly now.

Cheers.