A Quick and Dirty Drive Alignment Test Fortunately, when a disk drive is asked to read, it automatically searches to the sides of where the file should be if it doesn't find the data on its first attempt. Thus, it's probable that disks written by drives that are slightly out of alignment can be read by a correctly aligned drive. Conversely, it's likely that slightly misaligned drives can read disks created on properly aligned drives. Unfortunately, there is a limit to the searching. Consequently, drives that are too far out of alignment can neither read nor create readable disks. An easy way to check the alignment of a 1541 is to command it to search once and only once for the data. To do that, turn the drive off and on, then type on one line: openl5,8,15,"m- w"+chr$(106)+chr$(0)+chr$(1)+chr$(193):closel5 then press RETURN. Then insert a commercial disk and try to load it. If it loads, the alignment is good. (From Commodore Mailink May 1997, via The Commodore Information Center web site (http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html) )