Bill:

The best way for me to help you is to try to do this step by step so I know exactly what you're doing.

Are you saying that the 9090 was the only drive on your computer?

If so, do a dcleard0 after the drive has been on AT LEAST a minute or two. Don't shortcut this step as 
the drive has to stabilize and get up to speed and the 
unit goes through self-tests.  Note the lights after this step and tell me.

Then type ?ds$

Get me the message it gives you.

Do a directoryd0 and tell me what the drive lights do.

Then do a ?ds$ and get me the message.

The drive was run many hours and formatted at least twice before I put it up and shipped it.  I used this 
drive myself and kept it because it was one of the
 better units.

If you can format it, you can save to it because it writes to every track and sector.  I never had a drive 
that would format and not be able to write to it.

Don't mess with reseating the chips right now.

Get back to me asap with the answers and we'll move on to the next step.

-------------------
if you get errors, format the hard drive.  this can take hours:

Do this and get back to me -  You most likely won't be talking to me for a while if it get's past the first 
15-20 seconds.  But let me know if things look 
good right away so I don't worry about it.

Type the following and I'm assuming that it's the only drive on the B-128.

header"degnan9090",d0,i01  

type y to the prompt.

Watch the lights at this point.  They should both be green and stay on for a very long time.  This conducts 
extensive tests while it reformats the drive.  This may take three hours or more.

What I seem to recall on the early hard drives is that the heads could get slightly out of alignment during 
shipping.

Hope that's all it is.  I sold a bunch of these way back when and had minimal issues.
-------------------
Bill:

I don't think it's an issue with chips because you're communicating with the drive and there are no error 
flashes.

Only two-three possibilities left.

You brought up an interesting idea regarding initialization.  While this is normally only necessary with 
Tandon floppy drives as the others auto-initialize this may have some merit with a hard drive.

The dcleard0 command I used before shipping puts the heads in a safe area.  If those head somehow got stuck 
there because of either being dropped hard or some other unknown reason, the intialize command may move them.

So try this after restarting the hard drive and computer.

open 15,8,15
print#15,"i0"
close 15

Check the drive lights while doing this and hope we get lucky.  If that doesn't work, I'm wondering if manual
 movement of the head mechanism is possible on those older drives.

The other possibilities are loose cables from shipping vibration.

Bad controller board or bad hard drive which would be the least likely unless damaged in shipping.

Let me know.  :(