CBMSTUFF FORUM

hi!,

i own a Supercard pro and while reading today some posts in various sites about aligning heads in drives
using an oscilloscope and a special alignment floppy 5,25" ,

i was thinking, is possible to duplicate disks like these?
or they contains some special signals? or am i just talking nosenses?
maybe for duplicating one disk like this i need a perfectly aligned drive before?
so my normal floppy drive can't dupe it?

ideas?, i am a totally noob here...

Well, while it is possible to duplicate SOME of the tracks, you can't reproduce all of them because many of the tracks were written with micro-stepping. It is possible to step 8-10 times between the normal track step distance. When a drive is reading an alignment disk, it expects to find the proper track and the micro-stepped tracks that are around a "normal" track can be picked up when the drive head is out of alignment.

ahh! ok! understood now,
so... each of these microstepped tracks contains different data?, in the ids, or in the normal sector data?

as i think it works... aligning a drive means to center the head in the middle of each track? so track 0 and last track (39,79...) are correctly centered? the head/s i mean

Yes, that is all correct!