>It has some good information, some errors, and some good and bad guesses >(such as saying that it is probably possible to read hard sectored disks >with PC hardware)

Maybe he meant that if the computer he had, has an accessible DSP processor ( as some modem and sound cards have ). With this, one could use the controller to deal with track stepping and use the DSP to do the actual data reads. Of course, one needs to do some hard wiring to patch things together. ( Well, maybe he didn't mean that after all. )