
Ask HN: Help with Very Old HDD/Laptop - echelon_musk
I have been lurking for 7+ years and this could very well be one of those HN changed my life posts but I&#x27;ll spare you!<p>I have a really old (circa early 90s) Amstrad 286 based laptop that was gifted to me as I was &quot;intereted in computing&quot; a long time ago. The original owner of the laptop died early in his life and I was always curious if there was anything on it.<p>Fast forward a few years and I have watched BBS the documentary, and at some point afterwards I fire up the laptop again and find a file called &#x27;friends.txt&#x27; which was an ASCII advert for Rusty n Edie&#x27;s BBS[0]. I spent a bit more time exploring on the laptop and there are lots of personal files written in Word Star etc. that would be of significance to the family if I can read them.<p>Anyway, there is a whopping 40MB HDD (a Sony SRD3040C-50) inside which I removed from the computer and tried to read using a modern Linux distro and a PCI IDE card (based on IT8212F) but had problems retrieving the data. It would copy files at an extremely slow rate and then freeze completely. USB to IDE chipsets are a waste of time because 99% of the market are implementations of the JM20337 and they cannot read this disk properly (detect it incorrectly as 2TB in size etc.)<p>It has Prince of Persia, Golden Axe, Tetris etc on it and I was able to get a file listing using tree (39 directories, 2006 files) and I also attempted to create an image via dd but that also froze. I was able to get ~280KB of the disk before it froze which tells me that it is IBMMS4.0 and a FAT16 partition.<p>Essentially what I am asking if anyone knows any specialised old computing forums that would be better able to assist, or if anyone can recommend a feature full IDE chipset that would allow me to read the data, or to tell me if it is likely to even be possible to read the disk on a modern computer.<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS<p>tl;dr how do I retrieve data from an ancient IDE HDD with modern hardware?
======
phendrenad2
Does it have a 1.44MB floppy drive? Could you attach one somehow? That and 40
newly-manufactured floppy disks might be just the trick.

~~~
phendrenad2
Or I guess just 1 floppy would be enough, not sure why I said 40. Not like
you're going to keep the files on floppy disk long-term. But you definitely
don't want to wait to get a full backup. Who knows if powering up the drive
after all these years started some degradation process.

~~~
echelon_musk
Thanks for the suggestion, it had crossed my mind!

It's such an old disk I think it's expected to configure cylinders etc.

Reluctantly I have ordered a set of 10 floppies and armed with my directory
listing I'll aim to fit the disk back into the laptop and copy only the most
important data.

