ST11 BIOS - skipping drive initialization?

So, I've got a "Laser XT" clone which I hauled out of a dumpster a few days ago, and which has a Seagate ST-11R controller and ST225R drive inside. Upon booting, the controller (BIOS v1.7) detects that there's a drive present, then displays: "Drive 1 is not initialized. Run BIOS install routine for the drive (y/n)?" Pressing 'y' results in 'yes' appearing on the screen, but then nothing at all happening - no drive noises, no drive LED activity, no progress updates on screen. Although I might expect it to take quite a while to format, I'd expect some signs of life (and in fact I'm surprised it doesn't prompt for a defect table before doing anything else) Pressing 'n' does nothing at all, despite my expecting it to print 'no' on the screen and then immediately attempt a floppy boot. Does anyone know how to get around the initialization prompt, so that I can try booting from floppy and kicking the LL formatter off via debug? I suspect that the drive is fubar, but I'd like to try the debug approach if possible. The drive bears a 'PR' sticker, so I think as originally shipped it would have been matched to the controller and had a small partition containing the LL formatter - but I think the formatter is still present within the ST-11's BIOS too, and should be accessible via debug. cheers Jules