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

[BitWiz]

I have an HP 9122D with Sony OA-D323W-10 drives in it. On of the drives has lost one of it's heads.

I have the service manual.

Does anyone have any advice on replacing the head or should I replace the entire head assembly.

Where can I get a head or head assembly?

Thanks,

Mike

[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/

[BitWiz]

(07-07-2024 12:54 AM)Dave Frederickson Wrote:  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/

Thank you