Those of you who are regular followers of this blog will know that I have a fondness for vintage storage mediums. In my last PC I had a 5.25” floppy as well as a zip drive all running on a core i7 motherboard under Windows 7. After the Intel Ivy Bridge processors were released I decided it was time for a motherboard and CPU upgrade, the only catch was that I still wanted to keep my legacy hardware which meant the search for a modern motherboard with onboard floppy and IDE began. Eventually I came across the Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Ivy Bridge motherboard. Along with 10 SATA connectors, dual gigabit LAN and 6 USB 3.0 ports the motherboard sported both floppy and IDE controllers, something that is becoming increasingly rare in modern PCs. About a week after placing my order I received my new motherboard in the mail and began to assemble my PC.
2 hours and several 4 letter words later I came to the devastating realization that the motherboard’s on board floppy controller offered no configuration options, meaning it was hard-set for a 3.5” drive and wouldn’t support my 5.25” drive natively.
Enter the Kyroflux
Because I can be a little obsessive and never take no for an answer I began my search for either a PCI/PCI express floppy controller or a USB-floppy adaptor, and, after many hours of searching I came across the latter. The Kyroflux is a USB floppy controller built from an arm development board. Kyroflux is unique in that it reads floppies at an extremely low level meaning that the discs can no longer be accessed through Windows Explorer, but instead through the bundled Kyroflux software. Fortunately, using the Kyroflux software is fairly simple, although it is mainly command-line based. To read floppies one has to make an image of the inserted floppy and then use a third-party application to read it. After reading the instruction manual it wasn’t long before I was making .img files from my stacks of DOS-formatted 5.25” floppies.
Writing floppies is limited to only two image types at the moment although more image types will apparently be supported in future software releases. After building an Amiga disk file (*.adf) I was able to write the image to a spare 5.25” floppy disk. Days later I was able to create an image of the floppy and open it in Opus ADF to recover the files I originally wrote to it.
While the Kyroflux isn’t a perfect alternative to a 5.25” floppy drive running natively under Windows Explorer, it still allows data to be recovered from old floppies that you may have lying around. As more computer motherboards are being manufactured without any form of floppy support the Kyroflux is certainly a great way to add legacy support to a modern PC.
