Dragon Systems Speech Board 320

[schenkzoola]

I just found this board in a computer from eBay. It's a Dragon Systems Speech Board 320. Most of the chips have a 1987 date code.

Unfortunately the old Conner 40MB hard drive that was in the machine seems to have failed, so whatever software was used with it is likely lost.

If anybody has any information on the board, or has any useful info on recovering data from a seemingly failed Conner hard drive, I'd be appreciative. I did get it spinning by gently rapping it against my palm, but I can't seem to get any data in or out of it through my USB adapter.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

You'll need a real IDE controller on an ancient version of Windows to have any chance of reading data from that hard drive. USB2IDE bridge chips are often really dumb and don't support the full ATA standard, just enough to get more modern LBA drives working. Windows is the same story, Microsoft stopped supporting old CHS addressable IDE drives in the Windows NT kernel, sometime around Windows XP. I'd recommend Windows 98SE for the best chance of data recovery and attaching the drive to a real IDE controller on the motherboard.

Windows 98SE is new enough to support USB with the proper patches and drivers, so it can be used as a "tweener" to get the data to a more modern system.

 

[schenkzoola]

Thanks GiGaBiTe!

For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that the USB adapters were so limiting.

By the time I connected the hard drive to another computer, the spindle was stuck again. Another rap against my palm got it running and bootable!
It appears that it has the software for the card on it. I'm copying everything over via interlnk to a VM right now.

The hard drive wasn't very organized, with most of the speech board stuff being in the root. I'll see if I can make sense of it, and if so, I'll put it up on archive.org.