normal tolerances attainable on a specific device and the sensitivity of the particular read system of the disk drive a discrepancy of one and one half tracks 0 002 inches can be used as a general limit beyond which any alignment error should be corrected it should be noted that allowing an alignment error of up to 0 002 inches in each direction will allow various disk drives to have head alignment at different degrees of error a disk which is recorded on a disk drive in which the head is aligned 0 002 inches to the inside of a standard radii will be misaligned by 0 004 inches when read on a disk drive in which the head is misaligned 0 002 inches to the outside of a standard radii an error of 0 004 is over one third of the width of the track and while generally allowing accurate data transfer it is a limit beyond which accurate data transfer may become difficult the method of utilization of the present invention described above can be easily implemented on a computer a simple program implementing the process described in the flow chart of fig4 will allow the present invention to be utilized by people of relative little technical knowledge or skill simply by following instructions included within such a computer program while such a computer program 39 s location is independent of the tracks 21 through 39 of disk 50 from which alignment is determined a convenient place where the program can be stored is within tracks 00 through.