ATAboy bridges old IDE drives to the 21st century with Open Source USB host bridge — powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2350 and with custom "Award" BIOS menu
Open source solution for working with legacy IDE drives
If you've got a plethora of older IDE (PATA) hard drives that you need to run data recovery, backup, or for the fun of running retro hardware, then your biggest issue is connecting to a more modern system. JJ Dasher, from JJ's Messy Bench, has created ATAboy, an open source IDE to USB interface designed specifically for older hard disks.
The premise is simple. You have a drive that uses CHS (Cylinder Head Sector), PIO Mode 0 ATA and you want to get data to and from it. With ATABoy you connect up the drive, external power and then connect the USB Type C to your modern day PC. Jump into a serial terminal (PuTTY for example) and then use the very authentic "Award" style BIOS menu appear. From there you can auto detect the geometry, or manually enter the details. Mount the drive and your modern PC will detect and offer the drive as USB Mass Storage. That's it! ATAboy works with Windows, macOS and Linux devices, but the USB interface is "only" USB 1.1 (for now) and while that may sound sedentry for 2026, we have to remember that for older IDE drives that use CHS, this is still a fast interface. Often these drives were at most only a few hundred Megabytes in capacity.
The "Award" influenced BIOS screen is a sheer joy to behold, spoken as a person who was tinkering with 486 PCs back in the 1990s. The interface is simple, clean, and heavily nostalgic.
View Original
View Original
On the PCB we have the Raspberry Pi RP2350 SoC (System on Chip) as used in the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and the Pico 2W. This potent dual core Arm CPU runs at 250MHz, and the onboard GPIO handles the IDE to USB interface. The PCB was designed using KiCad, a popular open source CAD application.
ATAboy seems like a dream come true for those of us who enjoy using older PCs. It is compatible with CHS and LBA-type IDE disks, but it is geared more towards CHS. If you want to preserve an old drive, create an image, or simply move files to your modern PC, then ATAboy could be the tool for you. For some of the legacy disks, you will need to experiment with manually configuring the interface, usually because of unusual geometries.
If you want to buy one, JJ has them for sale for $50 or you can get the schematics and bill of materials (BOM) from JJ's GitHub repo to build your own. There, you can also find the latest firmware. You can also find a 3D printable case, designed using FreeCAD, to keep your ATAboy safe from harm. You could print this on one of the best 3D printers or even one of the best budget 3D printers.
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Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".
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ezst036 Pretty cool but it might just be easier and also cheaper to just get a pcie IDE adapter. Especially if you need two or more ports then the math is way more favorable.Reply
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wakuwaku Reply
You will need to hunt down specific models that have specific controllers that support CHS, something that the ATABoy explicitly advertises. Many generic pcie IDE cards lack such information. Most of them, and USB based ones, reportedly only support LBA. Such cards may also be more expensive due to being rare, or maybe they're not sold anymore and you need to get them used, or from old new stock on ebay of questionable quality. (Go ahead and Google for them, I tried)ezst036 said:Pretty cool but it might just be easier and also cheaper to just get a pcie IDE adapter. Especially if you need two or more ports then the math is way more favorable.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61InKSnit3S.jpg
I don't know why you would call it easy? Hunting down a very specific card, opening up your PC, pray you have a relatively older platform with more lanes and extra pcie slots, plug them in, and then go down driver and/or bios hell...is that easy?
The idea of USB is that you plug it in and it just works. Any being USB 1.1 means theres a high chance it just works with really old USB capable computers. Not to mention you do not need a desktop PC with accessible, enough pcie lanes and slots to use it. You can't use them pcie cards in a laptop can you?
You need multiple ports, just buy more ATABoys? I guarantee most Desktop PCs have way more USB ports than pcie slots, even if you count M.2. -
pjmelect Whats the point, you can buy a IDE or SATA to USB converter on ebay for a couple of pounds.Reply
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334800533895?chn=ps&_ul=GB&google_free_listing_action=view_item -
TerryLaze Reply
Read above, the ones you are talking about will only work with semi new-ish ide drives, the device in the article is for truly ancient ones that you had to define the sectors manually.pjmelect said:Whats the point, you can buy a IDE or SATA to USB converter on ebay for a couple of pounds.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334800533895?chn=ps&_ul=GB&google_free_listing_action=view_item