Tried connecting the MO drive I got on the cheap to my Akai sampler, discovered the Akai simply couldn't see the drive or an inserted disk. The MO drive itself unfortunately also failed to see the inserted disk and I had to resort to the emergency eject hole to get the disk out 😵 Opened up the drive and it's just a internal MO drive in an enclosure, so I can still use the enclosure even if the drive itself is possibly dead.
Decided to continue work on my Epson AT-550 NLX system. Cleaned the CD lens with a cotton swab, and the slimline drive now reads disks, even though it's very finicky and sometimes refuses to read a disk. With the CD drive functional, I installed the drivers for my USB ZIP drive and backed up the most important files to ZIP-disk. Then I decided to install my Adaptec 1520B SCSI controller in the NLX system, to be able to check whether it was the MO drive that was really dead, or the Akai sampler being a bitch (they have a reputation... 🤣 ). This turned out to be waaaaay more complicated than expected, because I couldn't get the Adaptec sparrow.sys driver to install...instead it kept whining about installing a Iomega driver for a Jaz-adapter card. Finally figured out that that driver was a much newer version of the sparrow.sys driver, and installed it.
But after finally installing EZ-SCSI I got a very interesting surprise - I'll update the system thread with it - but to give a hint: the motherboard has a hidden integrated SCSI controller! 😲