I have a really old (circa early 90s) Amstrad 286 based laptop that was gifted to me as I was "intereted in computing" 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.

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 'friends.txt' which was an ASCII advert for Rusty n Edie'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.

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.)

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.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS

tl;dr how do I retrieve data from an ancient IDE HDD with modern hardware?