I'm back: same portable, different issue.
I mentioned before that I have been having problems with the hard drive. I've tried a few things; bear with me as I list them out.
I had a few successful boots from the drive (with a 6v battery clipped to the battery bay connectors, and the adapter plugged in) before I did anything to the hybrid, though it progressively got less reliable, sometimes crapping out after the initial spin up, only to "catch" on the second spin up. Sometimes it would never get going.
I cracked the drive open and cleaned out the goo. It all appeared localized to the groove. This had no appreciable effect.
Around this time I did the hybrid board work. Battery only from this point on.
Post hybrid board work, behaviour remained the same... Very rare for the drive to 'catch' and read on a spin-up, but it would on occasion.
I decided to try swapping in the Conner HD from my IIsi, by swapping controller boards. The IIsi drive didn't work in the portable with the low-power board, and the portable drive didn't work in the IIsi with the regular molex/scsi board. The IIsi drive worked fine in the IIsi when reunited with its original board.
Assuming that the low-power board and drive were dead, I built an adapter cable as described here:
http://antinode.info/mac/port_scsi.html
I connected the IIsi drive up in the portable with this adapter cable, and on boot, the portable showed me the 'Welcome to Macintosh' screen... And then the drive spun down, and got stuck in a spin up / spin down loop.
I tried again a few times, with similar results. It seemed like it was having the same problem that it had with the low power drive.
AND THEN IT WENT BOINK.
One boot game me the chimes of death.
I disconnected the hd, but it didn't have any effect. I figured I had well and truly wrecked it, as it came up exactly the same on several reboots.
...Then, 10 minutes later, it chimed up as fine, and gave me the disk missing icon. It booted fine off of a floppy, and off of FloppyEmu after that.
Curious to know if anyone has any ideas, given this scenario. The portable still boots fine off of a FloppyEmu, so it's not just a pretty prop, but I'd love to get an internal HD back into the mix. I'm a little leery of trying anything to that end at the moment, given this misadventure.