Checked both drives and they both contained their terminating resistors, and all were firmly seated.
I removed all 3 sets of terminating resistors from each drive, used the 3-conductor cable with the active terminator, and tested each drive separately, but sadly it made no difference.
I then opened up my Emax rack and separately swapped each drive in there wondering if there was some hardware issue w/ the keyboard version I had been using, like a faulty power supply or scsi controller chip issues, E-Chip weirdness, etc. But in the end the result was the same.
Now the other day I did trick it by pulling the scsi cable on the HD, booting up to the floppy, getting all the way through the menu options to format the HD, and then reconnecting the HD cable at the last second before confirming I'm ready to format. It acts like it is working, the display says formatting HD, the drive spins and you can hear it writing, after a couple of minutes the display changes from "formatting hd" to "saving bank 01 untitled" and never completes. I left it for an hour and came back but it was still stuck on that step. Is that a clue?
Similarly, I can use the same disconnect/reconnect trick to perform a hard disk scan, but that just displays "Scanning HD..." and never completes. Also the drive never spins at all from what I can see/hear, unlike the attempted format which at least starts writing even if it never finishes. Again, I'm not sure if this is a clue, but I'm hoping to spark an idea.
Thanks,
Jim