ATAboy is a USB adapter for legacy CHS only style IDE (PATA) drives

https://github.com/redruM0381/ATAboy

by zdw • 5 months ago

65 40 5 months ago

github.com

burnt-resistor• 5 months ago

Aand it's vibe-coded. Nope. There are zillions of PATA USB adapters available on secondary markets that work.

RiverCrochet• 5 months ago

From article:

"While cheap, modern adapters usually only work with newer "LBA" type drives, ATAboy works all the way back to the earliest CHS only, PIO Mode 0, ATA disks."

So I guess this would work on some particularly ancient drives that a USB adapter wouldn't work with - not that I've ever encountered one. It is vibecoded, but sounds like it would work fine to get an image off of the drive, which won't be very large compared to even modest contemporary storage capacities.

gattilorenz2• 5 months ago

I don’t know, I have a cheap Chinese USB adapter and it read a 40 Mb hard drive from a 286 laptop just fine, so… plus larger (hundreds of MBs) disks too.

selfhoster11• 5 months ago

I have seen such drives. ATAboy promises to be a nice option if manufacturing and populating a PCB is not too expensive.

rep_lodsb4• 5 months ago

Seems to me from reading the deleted text file[1] like the author[2] used an LLM to get feedback on how to improve their own code. That isn't at all what "vibe-coding" usually means, and I say that as a complete AI hater myself.

Or do you have some "smoking gun" evidence?

I think the setup screen is a really nice touch and not something an AI would come up with.

[1] https://github.com/redruM0381/ATAboy/commit/4e55223acd1c8cdc...

[2] or someone else? it keeps using the phrase "your friend"

drum55• 5 months ago

“ Some of this firmware code was written with AI assistance. It currently contains an IPC re-entry, and possibly other bugs that could cause the RP2350 to crash under certain circumtstances. ”

Seems like an admission they’ve not really read the code either.

eqvinox6• 5 months ago

The Raspberry Pi Pico is good for a lot of things; this is not one of them (due to the lack of at least USB 2.0 High Speed). An LPC18xx, LPC43xx or even IMXRT106x would've been a much better choice.

alnwlsn• 5 months ago

You might only be able to get 8-16MB/s max out of some of those old drives (especially pre-1994), so you probably aren't missing much.

edit: whoops, that's bytes not bits per second

eqvinox6• 5 months ago

USB 1.1 Full Speed is 12 Mbit, i.e. 1.5 MB/s theoretical, zero overhead accounted for. That's an order of magnitude you're missing there. Whether it matters depends on how large the drive is, I guess.

It also bears pointing out these microcontrollers have built-in parallel memory interface buses, which are likely compatible with IDE (which is just ISA == the 8088/8086 parallel bus on a cable.) With DMA, ketchup and fries…

rasz3• 5 months ago

or good oldshool USB 2.0 Cypress FX2LP CY7C68013A or its Chinese clone Corebai CBM9002A

cy4611b___usb_2_0_usb_to_ata_reference_design https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/62992.pdf Back around 2005 a lot of USB HDD enclosures used this exact chip.

All the above needs is LBA to CHS translation.

eqvinox6• 5 months ago

or good oldshool USB 2.0 Cypress FX2LP CY7C68013A or its Chinese clone Corebai CBM9002A

I intentionally did not suggest those because dealing with an 8051 isn't something I'd inflict even on my worst enemy, let alone an open source hobby project.

That said if it's vibe coded I guess the AI can deal with it? shrug

Tharre• 5 months ago

It's a question of what tradeoffs you're willing to make. If you're making a professional product then sure, but I've checked the chips you suggested and the cheapest one available on JLCPCB seems to be the LPC1820FB at $6.5. If you fuck up a revision or two at 5 pieces each that gets expensive rather quickly for a hobby project.

It's a shame really that ULPI is such a complicated interface, at least compared to RMII or SDIO, otherwise you could just buy a high speed USB ULPI phy and use it with the RP2350 via PIO. Eben even mentioned at some point someone working on a PIO ULPI implementation, but I'm assuming that went nowhere because they couldn't make it work reliably.

An alternative approach I've been considering is using a ch32v305 as a "smart" USB-HS bridge, and connecting the RP2350 via SDIO to it. The problem with that of course is you have to implement most of the USB stack on the ch32v305, and the documentation on those chips isn't great to put it mildly.

hakfoo• 5 months ago

PATA-SATA adapters, the $3 AliExpress kind, seem to handle CHS fine. I have dumps of 40Mb and 200Mb drives from such adapters.

snvzz2• 5 months ago

What interface chip is this? Can you elaborate?

Joel_Mckay2• 5 months ago

There are also PATA SSD that are a bit more reliable, and fit the standard mount on older laptops. Because some models include several workarounds for older equipment (automatic wear leveling), these can last quite some time even with an OS that never supported SSD (turn off swap when possible).

If it is something important like old equipment, a CompactFlash SLC card with a PATA adapter is a proven solution.

Usually it is better to drop an old OS image into a 86box, and make the recovered backing image read-only. =3

bogantech• 5 months ago

With a PATA-SATA bridge support for CHS is up to the BIOS / OS

With a USB adapter though it's up to the adapter itself to support that which they generally don't do

stmw2• 5 months ago

Related to recent HN discussion re: SCSI version of same. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636571 Of possible interest.

ATAboy is a USB adapter for legacy CHS only style IDE (PATA) drives

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