I have my childhood Apple II GS with a bunch of peripherals, including hard drive and disk drives. The last time it booted was sometime in the early 2000s, and the last time I tried turning it on was shortly after that. It didn't turn on, and my dad and I suspected that it was a battery issue (last time it booted, there was a small blinking square in the menu bar, which my dad thought indicated a battery issue). I plan to get a replacement battery for it (looks like https://www.reactivemicro.com sells them - are they any good?). However, I'm also a bit cautious. Should I just plug it in and give it a shot? Maybe try that but without any peripheral plugged in? Any precautions I should do to avoid frying anything or causing permanent damage (besides not letting it sit in a basement for over a decade)?
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The main risk to damage something is a bad power-supply. If you know what you're doing, it'd be a good idea to disconnect the power-supply from the mainboard and power it up separately first. When there's no bang and no signs of smoke, measure and test whether the output voltages are ok. That would elimate the most likely cause of damaging something.
If you were really cautious, you could repeat the output voltage test with a suitable dummy load.
So it sounds like you have a ROM3 board with the replaceable battery then? (It's soldered in on the ROM1 boards.)
AFAIK it ought to boot with no battery, it's just that the PRAM won't hold any settings when you power off without one. So you may have another issue, especially if the battery has leaked.
Get that old battery out of there though, it's a time bomb waiting to ruin your machine when it leaks. I'm in the middle of trying to fix a very badly damaged one at the moment, and I curse the Maxcell Bomb every time I find something new wrong. :< Lol.
If you've got a ROM1 with the soldered-in battery, just clip the leads and pull it out, but leave enough of the leads in the board that you can plug one of those IBM-PC style battery packs onto the leads. I think ReactiveMicro sells a 2AA holder that will plug onto them, too.
I like to use a 3AA holder with a lid, personally, and mount it *outside* on the rear of the machine and run the leads in somewhere. Then if it leaks again, it'll make a mess *outside* of the machine instead of inside.
Thank you both!
It's a ROM1 board. The battery is soldered on and is dated October 1988. No sign of corrosion at all, fortunately. I'll test the power supply unit like suggested, and remove and replace the battery.
I will keep you posted.