Ok, SCSI controller card arrived on Sat and once I was up and running in an old Win XP machine, I was able to format, read and write to 3 out of 4 of my drives. Two of the original Miniscribe 20mb Emax drives and a Quantum formatted like a champ and had no issues w/ reads and writes in XP. Chkdsk reported no issues.
A 4th drive, a Quantum from my old Mac iicx, was recognized in "Device Manager" but "Disk Manager" did not recognize the drive and thus I couldn't assign it a drive letter and therefore can't speak to the health of that particular drive.
Unfortunately, NONE of my Emaxes can cope with ANY of these drives in them. They all hang up trying to load the OS from the floppy. The Emax always stops shortly after "loading software" at the prompt that says "Just a moment...". I think it's trying to negotiate w/ the HD at this point to see if the HD contains the OS, because you can hear the HD start to spin briefly while the floppy continues to spin. Without a hard drive, the Emaxes will boot up to the floppy as normal.
When formatting the drives in Windows, I tried both Fat16 and HFS, but results in Emax were the same. Does the Windows format cause the Emax to have boot problems? Do I need to do a low level format instead?
Or is this not shaping up to be a drive problem anymore?
Regards,
Jim