Syquest SQ52xx failure modes?

I was given a Syquest 200MB (I believe model number SQ5200) the other day along with a pile of cartridges... some 200 MB and some 44 MB. I knew of these drives in the day but never played with one so it's an interesting exploration. I was considering hooking it to my PDP-11/34 via CMD SCSI controller except... The drive will mount most of the cartridges although it seems to take a while. I hear a loud clunk, like a head load sound every few seconds as the orange LED on the front runs through a cycling pattern of blinking fast and then slower. After a few cycles of this, the green LED comes on and then I can sometimes read some data from the drive. I've got it hooked to a Linux box currently and I've seen a Mac partition table go by (which makes sense as this stuff was used in a print shop with a Macintosh). But after a few seconds of spinning, the drive appears to fault and goes back to the blinking orange LED again. After a little while of this, then it seems to just lock up... you can't eject the cartridge with the front panel button and the SCSI interface pretty much goes dead as the drive can no longer been seen by the host. I suspected the power supply in the enclosure it is mounted in so I have swapped that but no improvement. The original was drooping a little on +12 (down to 11.5v) and although that didn't seem like a huge issue, I have lots of supplies to substitute so I did. So, are there any common things that go wrong with these drives-- that were easily remedied? The heads look extremely fragile with a very tiny wire looped around the outter edge so I am not so excited about trying to clean them. The drive otherwise looks pretty clean inside... and the fact that I can read _some_ data suggests that there is life and something may just need cleaning, aligning or stopped from slipping. On the other hand, I am not so sure these drives were designed for field repair or service... Chris -- Chris Elmquist