Ok I wnet through 36 hours of shaking, sweating and going almost suicidal over the unformat message. I tried everything I could think of..I even phoned fostex who reliably informed me I was screwed ! Last ditch I removed the circuit board from an identical Fujitsu hard drive and replaced the circuit on the bad drive......Voila ! It worked and all the data (ie my customers album) is 100% intact so that is NOT in the official repair book and I was quoted 2-4000 dollars for 'data recovery' though this operation is not for the unsteady hand or the hard of vision. 