[TUHS] qd32 trouble

Hi all, Would anyone here be able to help me troubleshoot my qd32 controller? I have a pdp11/73 that's mostly working, boots 2.11 from rl02 okay, but I need my big disk to work so I can load the rest of the distro. I've been following the manual for the qd32 to enter the geometry of my real working m2333 (jumpered correctly according to the manuals), but when I load the special command into the qd32's SP register that's supposed to load the geometry table from the pdp11 memory to the novram, I get a bad status value from the qd32's SP register and it remains unresponsive when I try to store the geometry. If I go ahead and try the built-in qd32 format command, it responds similarly. When I pull in mkfs from tape (vtserver) and try anyway, despite the failures, to run mkfs on the m2333, I get an !online error from the standalone unix mkfs. The disk does respond (the select light flashes and I can hear heads actuating), but without geometry and format, I'm obviously dead in the water. Any suggestions on how to proceed? thx jake