Thanks stepleton! Note that the garbage is reported with the RW ROM installed, with my original Z8 the drive just never responds to the identify command. Is there some metadata in the ROM that could be missing, like a serial number? Since I replaced the ROM and LLF'd the drive, I can imagine that none of the original identifiers of the drive remain. Maybe that causes trouble?
Patrick, those seeks to the spare table are exactly what I'm missing. Instead the drive just takes a lot longer to advance paar the tracks with the bad sectors, without any head stepping. I had the covers off the entire time and thus can see the lack of movement. The drive is functional now though, with the newly flashed RW ROM (I tried both versions and couldn't see a difference in behavior).
