Need help formatting an old Quantum harddrive

[smcgroga@strider.Advent.COM (Stephen McGrogan)]

Yesterday I tried to format an old Quantum 210S so that my son could
replace the very slow Apple SC20 he is using on his Rom3 IIgs.

The IIgs would claim, during the finder startup, that the new disk
needed initialization, which was certainly true.  If we told the
popup message to initialize the drive it claimed that the drive was
write protected.  (We are using an Apple High-Speed SCSI card.)

After a few rounds of trying to initialize, I happened to go through
a restart and suddenly the disk was visible!  We used the Advanced
Disk Utility to format and initialize everything and partition the disk
into 3 PRODOS and 1 HFS partitions.

Zoom!  When the ADU finished, the partitions happily appeared under
the finder.  We then copied some things to the new disk.  After a while
there was a system hang.  We rebooted the IIgs and, presto-chango, the
finder claimed that the disk needed initialization again.

Sure enough, there was no trace that the disk had ever been partitioned.

I fired up Prosel-16 but couldn't find any applicable utilities to deal
with this problem.  An attempt to show the devices under Prosel caused
Prosel to crash to the monitor when it looked at this disk.

The drive itself doesn't have a terminator.
These problems occurred with or without a passthrough terminator.
The drive was daisy chained after the SC20, which continued to work
fine during all the experiments.  There were no unit number conflicts
and the High-Speed SCSI utilities disk correctly saw and identified
the drive.  Its attempt to format was no more effective that the ADU's.

What is going on? Is my formatting using the AHSS card not going low
enough?  The disk was just switched from a Sun Sparc 4/110,
where it worked fine.  I know that Sun puts custom eproms in their disks.
Is it impossible to use these disks on a standard SCSI system like
the Apple?  

Thanks for any advice!
Steve McGrogan
smcgroga@advent.com