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Our vintage Xerox Alto has been running reliably for months, but a couple weeks ago the disk drive malfunctioned and the heads stopped moving. With a drive that wouldn't seek, our Alto wouldn't work.3 After extensive debugging and studying the drive's complex head movement control system, we discovered that the problem had a trivial fix. This blog post discusses our adventures debugging the Alto's Diablo hard drive and how we got it to work again. The Alto was a revolutionary computer designed a...