> I am currently formatting this drive, and it throws up quite some read errors, but every format pass I do, there are less errors, so it is promising.> Less promising is the fact that it throws 101 erros when running Drive Hardware Test, under Drive's internal memory-test...
A SCSI-Harddisk formatter sends out a single format command to the harddisk controller which knows how to format the surfaces. The external software is just able to control some details as sector size, retry count, cache management, ...

After the formatter software sends out the command it waits for the result. If the harddisk controller tells an error then that's it. The software normally cannot repair local problems within the harddisk controller.

You can ask the harddisk controller for a list of defect sectors. You get two different values: the primary list tells you the sector numbers which are defect after production, the grown list are the defects since than. The first dozen (or hundreds, it depends on the capacity, the model, ...) errors are handled locally because there are some spare sectors. But the number of spare sectors is not endless.

This means: if you see the number of "grown errors" is growing you know that the death of the harddisk is in the near future.

Sorry for that, but I think that your Miniscribe is nearly dead because the formatter throws a lot of errors.