Defects of the guideway, such as irregularity and degradation of straightness, reduce the accuracy and cause earlier failures of positioning systems. This paper extracts the abnormal variations of signals from the oscillation of the pitch motion. The signal is processed by using Wavelet Transform. The energy distribution of the vibration expressed by the wavelet map not only appropriately depicts the locations of the defects of the guideway but also detects the frequency bands of the associated vibrations. Therefore, this approach significantly improves the ability for discriminating the obscure signal induced by unknown defects existed in the guideway. The effectiveness of this approach is proven experimentally by constructing a belt-driven positioning system. This method is useful when the condition monitoring and diagnosis are desired for precision positioning systems.