About 2 months ago I got a bluescsi for my Mac plus, and decided to pick up a high speed scsi card for my IIgs. I hadn't used the IIgs a lot since, but it was working. The past two days I had been using it more. Today suddenly GSOS was prompting me to insert my virtual drive when trying to shut down. I had no choice but to power off. When I powered back on, the boot screen hung, and eventually it tried searching slots 6 and 5. So the IIgs saw the scsi card in 7, but couldn't find the drives.
I made sure the bluescsi still worked on my Mac plus, it was fine. I ran the Chinook SCSI utility on the IIgs. It behaved the same. Hung on the select drive screen, and eventually popped up a message no hard drives found. If I pull the card, the utility does say no card found. So it seems the card is functioning enough to tell the utility it's present. it just no longer can seem to communicate with the drive(s). Confirmed similar behavior in my IIe.
Is there by chance any IC that maybe commonly fails on these, that would be easy enough to source and replace? The only think socketed is the eeprom and two plccs. There are about 16 other ICs soldered.
Or any other ideas on a fix? I guess I could try ohming out the db25 to the PCB. But a broken wire seems odd considering the cable never really moves, and it stopped responding mid session when the case was just sitting there.
With nothing to lose, I removed the eeprom and both plcc chips. Luckily I just happened to buy a plcc and a T handle DIP extractor this week. All 3 chips were fairly hesitant to come out, so it's possible there was some corrosion. One they were out, I used some D100 on the pins of all 3. The 53c80 chip was the only one that seemed to leave any kind of dirt on the qtip when I wiped the pins. The I used D5 spray in the sockets. I also gave the plcc socket pins a wipe with a atop after spraying. Let it all dry for a hour, popped the chips back in, and fired up the card. To my surprise, it worked.
I guess I'll have to see if the card behaves after being powered on for a while again. Hopefully it was just a case of some mild corrosion causing issues.
Happy ending. And a lesson learned for all.
Like they say on the C-64 sites - "DeOxIt that Socket!"