I thought I'd pass this along since I don't think it's been discussed before. Maybe everyone but me already knew this. Hopefully it formats properly for the TTL - sorry if the text wrapping is horrendous. I recently had three Miniscribe 8425 drives that wouldn't format. I'd get different errors (write errors, usually, but sometimes "drive not ready" errors) depending on which version of the service disk I used (V1.2 versus V1.4), and which OS software I had installed (V3.0 versus V5.0). It seems that the drive activity LED isn't usually populated on the MS8425 (the socket is there, but only one of my drives had the rectangular LED installed), so I went ahead and populated all three. Hmmm, the LED flash pattern is the same on all three drives. Hmmm, the LED flashes that pattern even when everything except the power to the drive is disconnected (even the WD1002S-SHD board). Aha! Some sort of drive self-test is failing on all three drives, and it's not got anything to do with the 9100 after all! There's not much info available out there about the MS8425, BUT there is a little more available for the MS8438 (which is essentially the same drive), including a spec sheet showing a list of LED flash patterns with corresponding error descriptions. Turns out my LED pattern corresponds to "seek error during burn-in or recal". Hmm, OK - must be a problem with the head position sensor. It's a thru-beam flag sensor, so I dust mine off and reseat the connector, only to get the same result. Despite the warning label on the drives admonishing me "do not rotate interrupter", I power things down and rotate interrupter. Power back up and BINGO! No error. Hmm. Power down again. Power up. Still no error. Repeat for the other drives, same result. It seems that the MS8425 is not smart enough to find it's own home position. That's really, really poor design. I found that the "magical" position seems to be with the flag blocking 50% of the thru-beam sensor. I have no idea how my three drives all got moved away from the home position initially, but it sure seems that's what happened. I was finally able to format the drives. Well, sort of. Two of them have "bad system sectors and cannot be used", and the third has 1300+ bad sectors. Folks really weren't kidding when they said the MS8425 was junk. Two small SCSI disks are on order, so I'm sure all my problems are now solved :-) Alex ---- ayeckley@elektronforge.com www.elektronforge.com _______________________________________________ Techtoolslist mailing list Techtoolslist@flippers.com http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/techtoolslist