Thanks!
Photos are attached (note, at the time the first photo was taken there was a cap missing on C6 (marking hidden behind the chip - it's near the J1 marking) and caps C10 and C11 should've switched position).
What you're saying makes a lot of sense.
When I first started on this caps had leaked and there was really bad corrosion. Still is, probably doesn't show well in the pictures (and I've cleaned a LOT).
Anyway, drive wasn't spinning up, the LED was always on. I found pin 14 and 15 on U19 were not connected so fixed that. Drive now spins up, I can hear the heads move a little shortly after power-up and machine recognises there is a drive. However it can't identify it.
As such I'm wondering if the problem is it can't read the ROM. The ROM (which I believe is U11 - chip closest to the connector) however seems to be (mostly) connected to U21 (the IBM chip next to the mysterious U19/612x117). I've verified continuity for all the pins on the U11 chip, so my hypothesis is some signal is not making its way from U21 through U19 and back to the connector.
The board appears to have at least one hidden layer however, because there are some pins which are connected, but I can't see a connection. Have tried a strong light but can't shine through the PCB.
Hence the wish for a circuit diagram and/or datasheet for the U19 chip.
Re your comment about Microchannel: The model 30 has an ISA bus. MCA drives have a wider connector and (as you rightly say) connect directly to the riser card. In this machine however there's a dedicated drive connector on the planar (IBM naming convention for motherboard...). Rumours say these drives are mostly MFM but with some IBM proprietary stuff added to it (inline power etc - not sure what else differentiates it from a stock MFM drive - but stock MFM drives do not work in this machine). They might not be MFM... anyway:
If you draw a line straight across the board from Y3 to C3 ish, that's where the corrosion was. The rest of the board was not affected. The worst area was between U19 and C10 and C11, which leads me to believe there is some pin which lacks a connection to somewhere. Or a short...
I probably should give up, but it would be so damned cool to get this working again...
I guess I could get a crashed drive and compare logic boards.
Thanks again for your help and patience!