Just got a Sega Teradrive

Xavier · Post by **Xavier** » Sat Apr 28, 2012 6:52 am

I doubt there to many other places on the net that'll have any info or care about this.
I came with nothing but the computer itself. Anybody have any technical info or know anything about it other than whats on the net in a couple webpages?
I did sucessfully get dos 6.22 and windows 3.1 running on it.
Came with just dos v5j
Uses a Sega Genesis gamepad and standard ps2 mouse and keyboard so I have those bases covered.
Some pages claim it could be used as a dev system, so far I havent been able to get mouch of that working and didnt look like anything cool was on the harddrive before I formatted it

Xavier · Post by **Xavier** » Sat Apr 28, 2012 2:51 pm

Please delete theres allready an open thread about this system.

Nemesis · Post by **Nemesis** » Sun Apr 29, 2012 5:57 am

Did you backup anything from the drive before you formatted it?

Xavier · Post by **Xavier** » Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:23 am

No I didnt, It seemed pretty empty only a few megs worth of stuff on it dos 5j and some txt files.

sega16 · Post by **sega16** » Sun Apr 29, 2012 6:06 pm

Did you read the txt files what if they contained information about the teradrive?

superjoebob · Post by **superjoebob** » Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:00 pm

If you don't mind me asking, where the heck did you find one of those? I've been looking everywhere I'm completely obsessed with getting either a TeraDrive or a MegaPC ^^.

Xavier · Post by **Xavier** » Sun Apr 29, 2012 11:13 pm

sega16 wrote:Did you read the txt files what if they contained information about the teradrive?

No I didnt see anything specific to the Teradrive so far as I could tell, just some generic dos driver files.

I got it on Ebay, they come up every year or so if you do a saved search. I bet they come up every month or so on Yahoo auctions if you can figure out how to use it.

ICEknight · Post by **ICEknight** » Mon Apr 30, 2012 11:08 pm

Please, try to recover the contents of the disk just in case there's something relevant.

LocalH · Post by **LocalH** » Tue May 01, 2012 1:44 am

Xavier wrote:No I didnt, It seemed pretty empty only a few megs worth of stuff on it dos 5j and some txt files.

There may have been some useful deleted files. I hope you didn't lose any such data by formatting it.

Xavier · Post by **Xavier** » Tue May 01, 2012 5:40 am

Hmm I tried to run some of the computers apps and the crashed my computer, the teradrive files will only run in dos vj.
Installed it and its almost useless to me, as a user is there any way to run two versions of dos on a system?

Munkyears · Post by **Munkyears** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 2:46 pm

Firstly! Amazed that these things are floating about, Wonder how many more are in storage?!

Your best bet would be to remove the HDD if you dare, and slave it in a PC, possibly running Dosbox and i can help you recover those files with some really interesting recovery tools i used to use on Acorn PC's. It will be too slow to do anything natively

Either way maybe it would be worth looking at whats inside that old file system

Huge · Post by **Huge** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 4:47 pm

Going by Nemesis' pictures, at least 6000 were manufactured.

Nemesis · Post by **Nemesis** » Mon Jul 09, 2012 10:51 pm

Getting data off the drive is a little difficult, since it uses an obscure version of the (already obscure enough) PC-XT IDE interface, which is completely incompatible with normal IDE, so you can't hook it up to a modern PC to transfer the data off. I posted info on a process to backup (and restore) TeraDrive hard drive images on this thread on assemblergames:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh ... isk-images

As for how many were made, it seems at this point it was certainly less than 10,000, but we don't know the exact number. The highest motherboard serial number I've seen is 007279, although the motherboards are common between the model 1/2/3 systems. The highest serial number on an actual unit I've seen is 10006271 on a model 3 system.

Huge · Post by **Huge** » Tue Jul 10, 2012 10:27 pm

I've seen keyboards with serials over 9000, but of course that means nothing without knowing the exact relations between those and the machine. As in, did they make as many keyboards as there were teradrives in total, or note.

I think theres a hdd connector like that in my old IBM 330. I think it's a 486. I need to back that thing up too... it does have regular plain IDE for sure though, since my spare 52x cd drives work with it flawlessly (plus there's an IDE slot on my sb pro soundcard too, but that one may actually be proprietary). Or at least, I recall that machine having such a cable. I'm curious if it would work with these machines.