Emax

hi group. i hope to document my agony for others to learn from. this has gone way beyond 'out of control'. maybe someone here can help. 

i now have: 
-a Baldwin IKE (worked fine for years via floppy)
(it now has the right scsi chips and added 5380 scsi chip) 
-two TEAC PCD-50b drives set to termination and scsi 0, 50 pin scsi cable (always minding pin 1 direction)
-power soldered in for the above drive, verified with multimeter
-pcmcia to cardflash adapter
-two of the 1gb kingston card flashs, inserted at various times. 
-two slim floppy drives.
-properly formatted floppys from EMXP 2.1.1
-the os 1.0 plus

since there was no spare molex connection for the TEAC drive, i metered out the floppy power cable and added one in there at the mobo. the first one smoked at the molex so i quickly shut it down and rewired it. i booted from floppy, and tried to format. initially i thought something was fried because i didnt see any LED activity lights on the TEAC drive. i ordered another one, which the cool guy at a4000t sent me. it also did the same thing. 

i tried both new slim floppy drives (TEAC also) and neither work. they get stuck at "loading software"

now the poor thing wont even boot with its OEM floppy drive. it just sits there with "disk not formatted" over and over. it even gives a new bizarre "click of death" when it does this. in fact, it does this with a floppy out of the bay. this is obviously bad news.  

i have tried about 15 floppies, all formatted via EMXP-- which has worked fine in the past. no go now, however.  
trying another method, EMXP wont format the CF card because it says "not compatible with emax"


keep in mind i DID this once for an emulator 3, so im probably not being stupid. i didnt have near this many problems.