Emax

Greetings All,

I have an EMAX II 4mb (2212) with the original factory installed external SCSI connector (black and to the rear and left of the volume slider.)  I am using OS 2.14 and the floppy works fine.  I also have an external SCSI Conner drive CP-30540 'hard set' to SCSI 1 and actively terminated with a terminator that has the green light on it when working properly.  I have been able to format and use this Conner drive fine without ever any problems.

My problem is every other device I own.  I have two different SCSI Zip Drives (1 external with the ID 5/6 switch, and 1 internal set to ID 5 mounted in a dual external case with the Conner drive, and a pretty hefty power supply.)  I just purchased an external SCSI NOMAI 750.C and two 540mb cartridges, this device has the 25pin SCSI cable exactly equal to the EMAX II connector.  It can also be set to ID 1 or 5.  I also have 4 different 25-25 cables, as well as probably a dozen 25-50cn cables I have tried out on all the various setups.  I also have several different 50pin SCSI CD Roms I have tried as well with a EMXP formatted CD.  Just throwing this info in as I can be certain it is NOT the connecting cable in any fashion, as I've tried like 10 different cables in all various arrangements and I am frustrated.

I power up the external devices and wait until they go through their initialization before I turn on the Emax II.  Here's my problem:

ONLY SPORADICALLY will the Emax II ever identify the 'type' of drive I am using, such as IOMEGA ZIP 100, and NOMAI 750 MCD.  USUALLY the Emax II displays SCSI # NOT FOUND, and occasionally as well will display NOT EMAXII DRIVE.

On the rare times I can get the drive to be at least 'named', I go ahead and try to FORMAT it and have even tried to simply COPY SOFTWARE to the drive as I read in other literature (EII, EIII) that ZIP drives require a special way of 'formatting' by just copying over the software.  In short I have tried everything I know and even the diagnostics (3629) to find out what is going on with these drives but no joy.  I ALWAYS GET "SCSI HARDWARE ERROR" flashing along with the ENTER light flashing.

Basically the Conner works fine but my Emax II does not like any other device I own, no matter how I hook it up, select the ID, or do anything with them, and I know that many combinations of hardware cannot be 'bad' to give "SCSI HARDWARE ERROR" all the time.

My 'only' thought on this matter is that the ZIP cartridges and the NOMAI cartridges since they are formatted to MAC/PC respectively among them have some kind of file system error that will not allow the EMAX II to do it's format job on them.

If I couldn't get the Conner to work either I would swear it is definitely something wrong inside the EMAX II like the SCSI CHIP, but the fact that the Conner works fine but nothing else does is what is throwing me.  Any help out there?

Kirk