Humm I may be out of luck for any SDI drives on my 11/44. I've tested almost all my HDA's and they all do appear to be bad. None pass the spinup diagnostics internal to the drive except one. On the one drive that passes the internal drive diags (both pre and post spinup), it also passes the internal spinup diags in a 30 minute loop. Good... but... If I boot RT11 off an RL02 and do an INIT on DU0 it runs ok. If I do a Squeeze/out:du0: dl0: it does copy all the files. However, periodically during the copy process the ra81 ready light goes off and the fault light goes on. But it doesn't fail... after perhaps 30 seconds the fault light goes off and the ready light goes back on and the copy proceeds. It may do this 3 or 4 times, but it eventually gets through that copy with no errors on the terminal (no RT11 errors). I can then boot RT11 off DU0. But that frequent fault light coming on give me the whillies. So.. I went to the diags. The basic controller diags for UDA50 pass ok, all 3 tests. The disk excerciser runs ok with default values... but the moment I tell it to also write in the customer data area, I start getting errors immediately. The errors say something to the effect of "R/W Ready lost during write". I'm assuming that's bad. But how come it only shows up if I tell it to write in the customer area? Given all the above, I was thinking perhaps I should reformat the drive (not knowing what else to try). The format "diagnostic" has all kind of warnings saying "do NOT run this unless you are positive you need to....". Not being familiar with these drives, I thought I'd ask those "in the know" here if it's really no big deal to run the reformat (preserving factory badspots). I'm just wondering if the format is messed up in the normal data areas of the drive but not in the diagnostic portion. Just out of curiosity, one of the HDAs that doesn't pass diags points to the R/W board mounted on the drive. I was thinking of replacing it, but then is a reformat mandatory? If none of these drives pan out, my /44 will be driveless. I'll have to hunt for some other RAxx drives. Thanks for any advice! Jay West