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.
Wow, that is awesome!!!
ReplyDeleteI am amazed.
I am trying to get a floppy diskette drive to work with my new computer, and haven't had much luck yet, as my motherboard has no floppy connector, but I will let you know what happens!
I'm not going to give up easily!!!
Possibilities also include an older board with ISA slots. Older BIOSes generally allow for 5.25 drives natively, and ISA slots can accommodate the Central Point Copy II PC board which, like the Kryoflux, can circumvent the floppy controller to expand read / write capabilities.
ReplyDeleteI don't understand the Kyroflux guyzmo : why not having a traditional FDD controler on that PCB interfacing with the PCI slots, allowing for "normal" usage of let's say a standard 1.44 3.5" floppy? Is it alsop related to the unavailability of file fomrat handling from contemporary OSes? If so, why not adding a simple FDD driver along the board? The circuitry doesn't seem like some obscure shamanic knowledge since ALL old motherboards have it, so what's the REAL problem here?
ReplyDeleteMy own answer... The so-called market « laws » doesn't allow those old FDD : for all manufacturers it "seems" counter-productive if not suicidal to make something which can only be used with obsolete mediums that are not manufactured anymore.
DeleteHowever, since there are MANY people who'd like to recuperate old 1.44 floppies, that were used let's say for archiving documents, if not for accessing to nostalgic stuff we did in that era, I'm sure that there would be a generational niche for such PCI controller : for all those people who were using 3.5" floppy disk drives, and who are much more numerous than the era of 8" flexible floppies mostly used by a smaller number (and for a majority specialized) people.
Where can one GET a Kryoflux board?
ReplyDeleteI need one to connect my old Mitsumi 5 1/4 to an LGA-1155 Board with NO port for a 5 1/4.