Picked up an Altos 8600 that I bought on eBay yesterday, amazingly the Xenix actually came up, but the drive failed as I was tarring off the file system. I had another Quantum 2040, put it in, tried to run the formatter, but it says to call Altos, asks for a confirmation but just returns to the menu if you type 'y' 'Y' or 'Yes' so I'm assuming there is a magic word you have to enter.
This is the same controller that the Z80 system uses (8000-14) so I'm guessing someone must have run into this before. I'm going to paw through the diagnostic binary to see if there is something that looks magical. Sound familiar?