HP 9122D (Sony OA-D32W-10) Head replacement

[Dave Frederickson]

Back in the day I worked on a lot of disc drives. Primarily HP 7905 and 7906 drives and I replaced a lot of heads.

I also had special modules for positioning and exercising the heads and alignment discs which were necessary for aligning the heads so that discs written on one drive could be read by another drive.

Once you replace the head it needs to be aligned. I don't doubt that there're ways of hacking alignment of a floppy drive but I've never considered it.

Edit: I briefly looked into the alignment procedure. It appears to be a very delicate task but here is what looks to be a pretty good alignment procedure.
https://polprog.net/blog/fdalign/