Water-damaged consoles are the worst of the bunch. Unpredictable and filthy… and then there’s the rust!

This little PS one, serial T213259, would power on, but it wouldn’t recognise any discs. There was corrosion around the controller ports, near the power jack, and even underneath the metal shielding. Some of the mess was hiding beneath one of the main chips too, which wasn’t particularly encouraging. The first thing to do was clean everything up and see what I was working with. There were a few suspicious solder joints near the power connection, and the power switch itself was in a rather sorry state.

After cleaning up the board, I discovered that the switch had plenty of rust inside. Out it came, and in went a replacement switch I had lying around. Not exactly factory original, but it did the job!

I also redid the power jack connections, which had some corrosion around them. With that sorted, I could finally test the controller and memory card ports. Both responded properly, and I was able to move around the PlayStation’s menus. Progress!

Unfortunately, the optical drive wasn’t doing much of anything.

I tried a replacement drive assembly, which I knew was working, but still couldn’t get the laser to behave. There was power reaching the drive connector, so I started looking more closely at the ribbon cable socket and the possibility of corrosion in the signal connections.

The next day I gave the connector another go. There was some contamination in there that I couldn’t reach with my usual cleaning tools. I eventually resorted to a little fine sandpaper, which isn’t something I normally like putting anywhere near a delicate connector.

And would you believe it, the laser started trying to focus!

A bit more testing even got the disc spinning. That was considerably more activity than we’d had earlier, so things were looking up. Sadly, it was still behaving as though there wasn’t a disc inserted, even with a known-good drive assembly.

Audio CDs weren’t working either, so there was obviously more trouble lurking somewhere. I considered trying a modchip as a last-ditch experiment, but wasn’t particularly convinced it would help. If the machine couldn’t recognise an ordinary audio disc, a modchip wasn’t likely to magically fix the underlying problem.

Meanwhile, the rusty metal shielding got a vinegar bath followed by a good scrub with aluminium foil and a toothbrush. I’d managed to get vinegar into a cut on my finger while fishing one of the pieces out, which was an excellent reminder of how much that stings.

The metal actually came up rather nicely. There were still some stubborn marks, but most of the horrible surface rust was gone.

So the switch works, the controller and memory card ports work, and the disc drive is at least trying to do something. Unfortunately, the PlayStation itself still isn’t reading discs. I’ve run out of ideas for the moment, but I’ll keep investigating.