>>I've seen Emax take an hour or more to format and verify a drive.
Wow, that's a long time. I bought my first Emax around '87 or '88 and while I don't have your level of experience & expertise, I have to say over the years I've can't recall a HD format lasting longer than about 5-10 minutes. Next time I'll let it ride for a couple of hours and see if it ever completes.
But I tend to think of the format as two parts--1. the actual drive format, and 2. the writing of empty banks. Based on the display, it gets past the "Formatting HD..." step and moves on to the "Saving Bank 01 Untitled" step where it eventually hangs. Does the fact that we made it to the 2nd step in the process tell us anything useful?
>>By doing the hot swap / hot plug you may have damaged the 5380 controller or the drive controller boards themselves.
CLEARLY I won't be doing this again, but it looks like I may have gotten lucky. The good drives still work fine in the keyboard where I did the hot swap, and they also work in the rack. Bad drives exhibit the same behavior in the rack as they did in the keyboard. This would seem to suggest that the controller boards may be ok.
Thanks,
Jim