Hi,
To make the long story short - here is the trace of this drive's boot sequence:
http://www.crashproofsolutions.com/max300sca/The sense code allegedly means - Heads cannot find servo sync (no PLR but heads with nonyncFound)
The drive is visible in SCSI BIOS as "Connected but not ready". I use a 39160 non-RAID controller.
I do have an identical drive that works fine and can be pilfered for parts. I tried the controller board swap just in case, which did not work.
The drive consists of 8 heads and 4 platters, but I think the heads are parked on a ramp, so it's probably only a moderately difficult job to move the platters to another disk instead of moving heads as compared to a rampless nightmare. I haven't opened this species of a drive before.
SCSItool reads the drive parameters, but won't let me check its G-list.
Am I looking at a bad head, in which case a swap would potentially yield a working drive, or is my problem even worse?