Looks like i have got 3 good drives out of the lot,

the 160mb quantum (which ironically is the one in the photo which clearly has "BAD" written on it, it is the only one from the lot that has never given me trouble)

and the 2 40mb connors, got the second one of them working by jamming a little bit of foam in the head assembly to stop it going all the way back tho the rest position (where it just gets jammed) proably not good for the drive but hey, it didn't work atall before i did it and now it reads and writes perfectly

just gotta figure out what i'm going to do for the others now, since these drives are really hard to find...