Update:
I managed to take yet another old Miniscribe that I had previously written off, used the interrupt pin trick to get it to spin up, and successfully format it in Emax. I then tested it again w/ a 2nd Emax and it formatted there too. This might be a sign that the Emaxes are fine and the other old drives are the problem.
I also got my Acard 7720U IDE to SCSI bridge and 3 different internal IDE to CF adapters but I can't get them working w/ Emax.
Here are the 3 CF Adapters I bought to test with:
Addonics ADIDECFB - http://www.addonics.com/products/adidecf.php
Syba 257766 SD-CF-IDE-A - http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=384
Hexin Technology HXSP 2108P - http://www.soarland.com/Universal_40-pin_Male_IDE_To_CF_Card_Adapter-product-163.html
The Syba wasn't even recognized by XP or Win 7 so that one's dead in the water.
The Addonics and the Hexin are both recognized by Windows whether connected directly to the IDE and also when connected to the Acard 7720U thru my SCSI card -- all good signs.
However, the Emax isn't able to format them. In troubleshooting, I attached some LEDs to the LED pins of the Acard bridge as well as to the Addonics card (the Hexin has no led activity pins on its board). In Windows, the activity LEDs light up as expected during boot & any read/write operations. In Emax, the LED of the Acard and the Addonics reader only flicker briefly when first powered on, and NEVER blink during an attempted Emax format or drive diagnostics. The Emax lets me initiate a format, and goes through steps "Formatting HD...", "Saving Bank 01 Untitled", and "Saving Software..." but shortly thereafter dies with "Hard Drive Error". It's like the Emax sees there is a drive connected, but it can't communicate with the SCSI bridge. At least that's my assumption based on the lack of LED activity.
Configuration:
Acard board REV is 3.1, and Firmware is 3.89 (3.89 seems to be latest. On same day 3.89 was released a 6.89 was also released. Both are 32k files, though a binary compare proves there are differences. However, I couldn't get 6.89 to install. http://www.acard.com/english/fc0101.jsp?prodno=AEC-7720U )
SCSI ID on Acard is 0
Jumpers for Acard on-board termination ON & on-board termination power ON (defaults). I later tried with all variations of these jumper settings with and without an active terminator on the different cables I tried.
Tried several different CF cards (all of which are working when tested in PC)
Tested the Addonics CF reader with and without the DMA jumper on
CF Cards tried:
Canon FC-32M which is actually just a re-branded SanDisk SDCFB-32
PNY 128 MB which is a re-branded Toshiba THNCF128MMA
2 different Cisco 64 MB cards which are labeled on back as SanDisk SDCFB-64
I also tried to write a disk image to a CF card with EMXP, but it failed due to the error "The disk in drive ... is in use by other software. Please close any program that may be using the disk (this can even be Windows Explorer...)" I even went to task manager and killed the Explorer process, but that didn't help. Also tried booting into safe mode to limit what else could be running but still couldn't get around this error.
Any suggestions on what to try next?
Thanks,
Jim