This 'Dry Type' Floppy Drive Cleaner from Japan
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2024
- Here's the video this is a response to: • This Rather Mysterious...
So yeah, that mysterious Teac floppy cleaner I got a while back? The mystery deepens and it's brought me to this FD Head Cleaning Disk sold by Justy. In Japan these are often known by the term 乾式 ヘッドクリーニングディスク, or "dry head cleaning disc." These "dry type" cleaners are in contrast to the "wet type" disks with cloth inside that you moisten with liquid.
However, seeing this side-by-side with that disk from Teac? Yeah. I have more questions. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![รวมเพลงลูกทุ่ง 6 หนุ่มไทบ้าน ฮิตติดกระแส ชุดที่ 1 l มนต์แคน ไมค์ ไผ่ เสถียร ไหมไทย พี [Longplay]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/GD2v1OjMw5I/mqdefault.jpg)
Oh! So I talked to the owner of a computer shop near my work, and you often come up. He mentioned the "floppy cleaner diskette" you had. He said that 20ish years ago, they used to take blank floppies, and just write a program on them that would move the head back and forth a lot to "exercise" the drive, and slapped a "disk cleaner" sticker on the front. He also mentioned that it was pretty much snake oil, and they'd give them away with purchases for peace of mind.
I think it was some sort of sector-by-sector disk checker or something.
I remember those. Basically garbage, but the idea was to work the head across the spectrum to stretch it out so to speak.
The HD on the disk tells me its just a normal disk with junk files on it. I bet you can even format it!
Thought that from the beginning, would've been better as a 'hard disc' cleaner (saving time via a bootloader to auto-format a hard drive)
So snake oil with extra steps. Duh, I don't even know why are people trying so hard to find a purpose for the teac :D Obvious BS, don't act like fraudsters haven't existed since the beginning of time...
@@cueball981 i recon too, you just wipe the disk and re use it.
It’s a placebo disk to sell to people that “need a disk cleaner” old computer shop I worked at had several gimmicks people requested. They would complain real disk cleaners “didn’t do anything”
Reminds me of how some modern software shows loading bars just to make the user think it is doing something because no one will believe it finished in less than one second.
Computer hypochondriacs 😅
@threedoubleyou dotcom so because a company exists that means they can't won't sell snake oil? 😂
Exactly!!! Anyone can slap onto a blank floppy disk a sticker with a brand name printed on it!
@threedoubleyou dotcom I doubt seriously Teac had anything to do with it.
Somwhere an ex TEAC employee is watching this, laughing and thinking “they still fall for it” 🤠
There's no way that software was made by TEAC, the diskette maybe was.
@@0raffie0 The sticker was!
@@dwaynezilla the ink was
@@AlwaysBolttheBird the audience was!
@@lockinhinddanger934 I was!
The real value of these experiments is getting to hear the teac music on repeat
"the teac music" is a movement from the classical era song called "The Four Seasons" by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi; Concerto No. 1 in E major, "La primavera" (Spring).
@@Psythik Yes, I know. It's also The TEAC Music. Just like Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" 2nd Movement is also "The Civilization 2 Gandhi Just Nuked Somebody Music".
UFOs? Bermuda Triangle? Big Foot? No, we’re talking real mysteries here, like a Japanese floppy cleaner from the 90s that looks exactly like a normal floppy.
sadako will call you in 7 day after using it
History channel wishes it had content this riveting.
SCP wants to give it a number.
So I downloaded the floppy image and opened the hex editor to browse through the files for any clues. What I found was:
- The graphics are in MAKIchan Graphics format, and the meta-data in the header shows that two different computers were used to make the graphics: "98SA" (I assume a PC98) and "MPS" (no idea)
- The Metadata for these MAKIchan files just says "C-lab. Floppy Disk Drive Head Cleaner" and nothing else.
- It was compiled using Borland TurboPascal for Windows Version 7.0
- Some long searching reveals that this file is one component of the sound driver (specifically for the PC-98): github.com/mistydemeo/pmdmini/blob/master/src/pmdwin/ppsdrv.h -- note one of the comments referring to 1994 as an example date, so it's era appropriate
- There is a long string of 16-bit characters at the top of one of the files (OPNDRV.COM offset 608). Assuming it IS UTF-16 then it spits out Chinese characters rather than Japanese.
- There is not a SINGLE reference to TEAC *anywhere* in any of the files.
So with the meta-data not containing any reference to TEAC, a lack of any copyright information except for the NaoNeko sound driver v0.1, the random insertion of Chinese text into the audio driver and then the physical label on the floppy disk itself looking really poorly made for a company like TEAC makes me think it's a fake disk, in the sense of it being sold by a shady company using the TEAC branding rather than TEAC themselves pushing it out there as snake oil for use in stores.
If someone wants to try and better translate the HEX for the text data into a more legible form, here's the dump of it. I got most of the Chinese characters out of it, but either I don't have the full character set installed or it's not actually UTF-16 and it just happens to line up. Either way, it's REALLY strange that it's just... there. The NaoNeko sound driver is Japanese so you'd think it'd show Japanese characters but, nope.
6A028F02 B602DF02 0B033903 6A039E03 D5031004 4E048F04 E80E120E 480D890C D50B2B0B 8A0AF309 6409DD08 5E08E607 74070907 A4064406 EA059505 4505F904 B2046F04 2F04F303 BA038403 52032203 F502CB02 A3027D02 59023702 1702F901 DD01C201 A9019101 7B016501 51013E01 2D011C01 0C01FD00 EF00E100 D400C900 BD00B300 A9009F00 96008E00 86007E00 77007100 6A006400 5F005900 54005000 4B004700 43003F00 3C003800 35003200 2F002D00 2A002800 26002300 21002000 1E001C00 1B001900 18001600 15001400 13001200 11001000 200AFB09 220A2A0A 360A3E0A 430A480A 510A5A0A 630AC10A E20AF40A FA0A250B 200A200A 200A520B 6C0B760B 810B8C0B 970BA20B AA0BC40B D60BEC0B 050C0000
While Unicode existed in the 90s I don't think it was that popular back then, especially on DOS or Windows 9x. Maybe it's in another encoding?
@@marcusaureliusf I've tried several encodings and I can't get any of them to display anything legible (and encodings like Shift-JIS just throws up a bunch of errors). Plus, some characters seem to start with with values too high for some standards of Japanese text encoding. UTF-16 is the best I can find. What we really need is someone with a PC98; character set might not be so backwards compatible as I first thought.
C-lab. (with the included period), is a Japanese video game and computer software developer by the way. This would have been right up their alley.
I don't think the data at the top of OPENDRV is actual text (for PC98/DOS/Win 3.1 it would absolutely not be Unicode, Unicode is too new). But the bottom of OPENDRV contains some error messages in Shift-JIS
ＦＭ音源ドライバー Ver. 0.1
(c) 1994 naoneko. all rights reserved.
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーは常駐していません。
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーを解放しました。
$ＦＭ音源ボードが見つかりません。
$ＦＭ音源ドライバーがすでに常駐しています。
I originally thought it was a "prank" disk. Back in the late 80s, I had a disk you could run that would display a false C prompt on the screen. When any command was entered, it would display an error message (possibly a virus warning) and say that the floppy drive needed to be 'cleaned.' It would then play the sound of running water and move the drive head back and forth as if it were an agitator then finish with a "spin" cycle.
Oh yes, I remember this one! 😁
LOL!!
Even found a video of it, but sadly the sound is played much too fast, on my machine the whole process lasted about 20-30s (Commodore PC-10, a XT-Clone).
th-cam.com/video/5FhCyftAcbU/w-d-xo.html
I'm also pretty sure this is how I caught my first computer virus, 170x, AFAIR
Do you happen to know a video recording of this? It sounds amazing.
The High Density logo on the Teac disk makes me think it's a bog standard floppy and just a placebo!
I noticed that too
That disk is basically the longest troll ever.
I think "all your base are belong to us" is a pretty good contender to the title. LOL
My thoughts on the Teac is that by simply accessing the disk - the physical motion of the drive heads moving repeatedly - is what they consider "cleaning" it. The heads are now cleaner because they.. moved a lot. It's all I got.
You keep telling the other people to watch the first one, yet they keep asking questions the first one answered. I feel your pain :(
Seriously though.
I'm _still_ getting "THERE'S BRUSHES ON THE DISK, ROTATE IT AROUND." 🙃
@@LGRBlerbs 🤦♀️
@@LGRBlerbs But that doesn't even make SENSE. Brushes would just damage the head and make things worse!
@@LGRBlerbs Maybe they know it and are just asking for fun, like asking Strong Bad how does he type with boxing gloves on.
@@LGRBlerbs To do that you'd need some sort of device that holds the disk in place and has an attachment that lets you turn it. I don't think there is any such contraption.
I had a similar disc a long long time ago, but the disc was split into two sections, half the program the second part was dry head cleaner. I have a feeling your disc is a pirate of this disc, I will try find my boxes of discs to see if I can find it and photograph it for you.
Ooh. Feel free to email me if you find it: Clint@lazygamereviews.com
So, the TEAC works as a HDD cleaner too? Bonus!
And even as a SDD cleaner. What an awesome product!
@@wohlhabendermanager I bet it works on RAM disks! Very versatile tool!
If you run a copy directly from OneDrive, it will clean Microsoft's cloud servers' drives, too.
@@BilisNegra Good idea, I'm gonna do that and send them an invoice for cleaning their equipment
I remember using the dry type pretty often back in the day. It worked like the disk in this video. The OS never recognized it. I was pretty shocked when I started getting CD-ROMs that were cleaners that were recognized by the system. It was pretty surreal back then.
@Brandon Taylor seems like it cleansed it of the willingness to work, so yeah, that was a good cleaning CD.
"Your laser lens has now been thoroughly cleaned."
Does anyone else remember a screen saver that "cleaned" your monitor from the inside out?
Thank you for this follow up. It's nice to see one working the way I'd have expected and have the comparison.
My life's goal is to send Clint something so mysterious as to generate 2 follow up videos on it's very existance.
It'd be interesting to load the .exe on the teac disk into Ghidra and see what it's doing beyond the GUI, if anything.
Please do and post on his subreddit!
Is this .exe available anywhere?
The link to the image is in the description under previous video.
Ooh, you found another one of these! Neat! (and it’s even a real one this time!) I just love it when going down a rabbit hole like this ends with something fun.
14 minutes of getting dry head? Only because it's you, Clint.
The teac floppy looks like someone bought a bulk load of disks and sold them indivually with a label....
That's it exactly if you ask me. Same thing goes on in that part of the world today, but with phone knockoffs, where it has 12 cameras but only 1 real camera inside. and a fingerprint scanner that just knows when the screen is touched, you can unlock it with your dic.. I mean nose.
The royal Diskdrive is clean, your Highness.
thanks for your quality work
Glad we cleaned that up
6:50
_IBM Thinkpad humming noises have entered the chat._
The only thing I can think of judging by how it sounded in the previous video is the Teac one has its data arranged in a way that when reading it shakes the head continuously - and by that it "cleans" the head.
I'm glad I saw this. I have a Yamaha Electone ELX-1 from the early 90's and I hadn't heard that Yamaha instruments should use the dry type floppy drive cleaner. Good to know. Thanks. I also have a Mavica MVC-FD200 in need of some head cleaning....
I fucking love blerbs. This could be the only LGR channel and I would be satiated.
Learn something new every day. Had know idea drive cleaners were a thing.
I had one of these TEAC "cleaning discs" it came with a floppy drive from Maplins I think. I just chucked it in a drawer until I encountered a drive that needed cleaning. I invested in some IPA to put on the surface as I was always a little puzzled as to why it didn't come with any, I was stunned when I slid the shutter aside to see a normal disc surface! I assumed I had been conned and I'm pretty sure I just formatted it and used it as storage. I don't recall actually running the disc though.
It reminds me a little of when I worked in 'tech support' for a computer retail for dummies company in the early 2000's, we had a process at the time that we called the 'electrostatic discharge' process. Customer would call up to complain that they'd moved their computer and now it didn't work. We'd ask if they were sure they'd plugged everything in correctly, which of course they have. We'd then suggest we try this process, which would clear any 'static charge in the capacitors' and ask them to unplug everything, then press&hold the power button for 10seconds, then plug everything back in again, and 99% of the time everything would work. We knew it wasn't doing anything other than getting customers to actually plug things back in properly, but it made them feel better.
I remember the ones like the Japanese dry cleaner being available in Tech shops on the Tottenham Court Road in the 90s. They had a mixed rep - some people swore blind they were better than the ones you dripped isoprop with 'non-ionic surficants' on to the platter, others reckoned it was a great way to rip the read-write head from your floppy drive. I saw them in 5.25in, 3.5in, and the Amstrad 3in form factor. I tended to carry both wet and dry (5 and 3.5) with me on site visits to fix things, since sometimes the dry one didn't do the job, but both did. (the FDDs often got clagged on the coal fired power station sites... I don't want to know what the fine particulates were, but If I live to be 100, I'll claim those visits knocked a decade of my life)
As to the TEAC FD - unless it's doing some odd 'degaussing' routine specific to TEAC hardware, I'd guess, as stated below, that it just forced the head to fully extend - while not cleaning the head, it would potentially fix some read-write errors caused by 'sticky' rails. TBH, unless someone was doing something strange - running it in a site office where there's ash/brake particulates/ other industrial smeg, thrashing the FDD, or using disks that shed oxide, there wasn't much need to clean a disk head, and was mostly a hail mary when you were getting a lot of errors across numerous disks.
The Justy OAC-10 is a great model. Classic.
What if the first one is a prank disk? You ran a "floppy disc cleaner" and got an animation of someone cleaning. A cleaner on a floppy disk.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't imagine a counterfeit or rippoff product would go to the trouble of including software for something this simple plus the whole thing gives off a WinBlows95 vibe.
Uhm, LGR actually talked about that in the video mate, maybe watch before you comment. :P
I was thinking the same thing...
The Teac disk tricks you into making a TH-cam video about it years after it was commercially available. 😁
It is still exercising the drive (helpful when old gears are stuck), it just doesn't offer anything that you couldn't do with a normal format.
Possibly the Teac came with some kind of alcohol-based paste that you must spread on the disk surface before inserting into the drive (or maybe there's something inside the disk, I'd love to see a teardown).
Maybe it pairs with a TEAC drive that has internal cleaning pads. And running the executable parks and unparks the head to these special areas or something. Maybe the access pattern of the head makes it shed some dirt. Fast wiggling. Who knows.
Good to know it can clean your hard drive too
The only thing I can imagine is that the TEAC one looking like regular media is something like it is used with LTO and DDS tape drives. It works by using the fact that it is just a bit rougher than a regular tape. And these look identical as well. As new tapes are rougher than used ones, they have the same effect to some extent. If this exists for floppys as well, it could be a true cleaning disk, but a fake as well. I had a VHS cleaner that played video and didn't understand how it worked, could only be this system with a rough tape like the DDS system uses
I feel kind of bad sending that TEAC disk now and sending you down that rabbit hole haha I really just assumed it was was placebo and didn't do any cleaning. Unlike your new cleaning disk
how could you? :)
@@Locomamonk I did have a good laugh as well watching this unfold. Should have sent it for April fools haha
I hope LGR wrote the date on the disk. Yes, it mars the pristine nature of the label, but the disk itself has already been marred, so it would be nice to have a record of when that occurred for anyone stumbling on it in the future.
in wrestling terms, these cleaning floppies have worked you into a shoot, brother
Go home, smark.
@@AsukaLangleyS02 IT’S STILL REAL TO ME DAMMIT
At least it didn't kick his leg out from his leg
I had a similar floppy drive "cleaning" program on my Amiga, it is basically more a floppy drive tester. The hidden files are intentionally fragmented on the disk, so that the drive needs to read files from different tracks around the disk.
You know you've wandered onto a strange road when you can talk for nearly 15 minutes about a floppy disk cleaner. "All the trees looked strange to him, and he knew he was far away from home". :-)
Okay, what's the next crazy theory we can come up with on how this disk theoretically works so Clint has to try it again to satiate his curiosity while amusing us?
Maybe we can convince him to adapt these videos for an episode of Oddware, it certainly qualifies 😄
My theory is that it is rapidly moving the head back and forth kind of like those “floppy disk music” videos do to produce sound. Perhaps if the head is vibrated at the right frequency it knocks the dust off.
He needs to (or have somelese) decompile it to see what the code does, line by line.
@@PhilGlockner That's the only thing that makes any sort of sense to me at this point. I can get the logic behind the theory but I just can't see it working at all.
It arranges a set of bits in memory to form a symbolic invocation of the ancient Hittite god of clean floppy disk drives, then directs electronic prayers at it.
Alternatively, it sets up a CPU instruction that resonates at the exact frequency of the great galactic blancmange, which extends itself 5th-dimensionally into the floppy disk drive and abducts all the dirt particles for its own nefarious purposes.
I feel that the weird disc cleaner may have had a 2nd dry type disc with it, it seems to me that it is used to "clean" the mechanism of the drive and make sure it moves to each sector properly, not a head cleaner, so i imagine you would use a dry type disc cleaner for the heads, *then* you could use that disc cleaner which moves the mechanism along and so on, having these in tandem would avoid the need to open up the drive or the program will at least show you there is an error if it fails. Kinda usefully actually.
Hey Clint,as for the TEAC Disk, I was wondering if they might have a file with a changing byte pattern on it.
This "might" magnetize/demagnetize the heads the same way as you can do with a screwdriver. Of course a floppy will always read different bytes and therefore it shouldn't get stuck on one polarization, but who knows? You could open up the files in a hex editor to see the pattern or even look for api calls in the exe... or just leave it like it is 😁 great video as always!
Please make a collection tour, lgr!
Copying that TEAC head cleaner on to the hard drive was brilliant. Now it will do as good a job cleaning the heads on the hard drive as it does on the floppy....
3:12 Wow, this instant has awakened childhood memories that would have remained dormant forever till death. Funny thing, not about floppies but cassette tapes. I think that's the exact hue of the material some cleaning tape back then at home was doped with. I remember cleaning heads with cotton swabs and alcohol later than that, so I guess that was not a thing we trusted that much after all, but well, we didn't know any better. Quite probably it was part of a kit and that's why we didn't pay much attention to it.
I used these back in the day, all I did was put the disk in... then fire up a command prompt and run DIR A: a few times until I was happy.
The TEAC has to be some black market ripoff thing that some manufacturer slapped the TEAC logo on.
I'm sure I had a head cleaning disk that looked exactly the same as your disk but it came with the standard fluid like in the cloth ones, you put the fluid on and it cleans the head.
I think people are forgetting or ignoring that fake/scam/placebo products always have and always will exist. Thanks for the update and showing that the Teac isn't really cleaning the drive. Also, I can't imagine the Teac would even load properly if the drive truly needed cleaning.
Incredible to think the amount of time people collectively spent watching a video about some random diskette in 2021!
I suppose the TEAC one is a placebo disk of sorts, but the act of having the data spread across the disk will no doubt force the head to move along the rails, and read different parts of the disk. Perhaps its to help keep the drive in good working order by doing this. Very odd!
[Edit: seems others have also come to the same conclusion. Snake Oil under the guise of keeping the drive working at its best and giving it excercise :D ]
I've uses a DDS-4 and DAT-160 Tape drive for awhile and I do uses a cleaning cartridge every now and then.
I suspect these dry floppy cleaner would be similar in terms of material and method of operation to DDS/DAT cleaning cartridge tape, in that it whizzes pass the read/write head to remove any debris and that said debris will stick to the media.
Someone, some time ago, decided to put time into a drive cleaning scam disk. They made 10s of dollars!
It really is a pretty elaborate no-op.
I think it's supposed to be like a vibration cleaner, move the head back and forth a lot, like some modern DLSRs have a ultrasonic cleaner in them to just shake dust loose, I think it's a similar concept, maybe the data is written in such a way to cause the head to move a lot to access it.
You should've tried using a dual-floppy machine, you should've put one disk in drive A and it would clean drive B. Works even better with quad floppy drive setup! You just put Teac disk in drive A, dry cleaner in drive B, wet cleaner in drive C and a piece of paper in drive D. And all you drives will be cleaned! Also if you have CD-ROM attached, it will be cleaned as well, both inside and outside.
It took me until the end to realise this was sarcasm, lol
You'll never need to use "retrobrite" after this method!
The only thing that disk could clean is the frost off a cars windscreen (sorry, windshield). Much respect for your thorough research into this.
I had one of those Scotch VHS cleaners with the on screen message "heads are clean, press stop" which surprisingly worked every time. Cleared up the image in around 3 seconds usually. I assumed it was using somewhat abrasive tape stock. Maybe the Teac uses something similar.
I do have a Betamax head cleaner that seems like similar snakeoil. You play the tape and it shows an image which basically says 'Play this tape until the picture becomes clear' It does seem to work while it shows video.
I don’t know why, but now I want a floppy drive cleaner for my Mavica cameras lol
Cleaner disks would make sense on Mavicas, because disassembling them enough to get to the heads with a cotton swab is much more difficult than with a regular desktop drive. Still haven't cleaned mine (which I got years ago, prompted by LGR and 8BG reviewing them) but it does work flawlessly for now...
I remember a bunch of years ago having a floppy disk cleaner that was normal looking, but had a little tiny brush attached to is that swept the heads....
It’s just a placebo disk for those who were used to cleaning their cassette and vhs heads in the past. People will buy anything, especially if they are using new tech at the time. Anyone remember “colour” screens to place on your B&W TV?
Extra LGR? For clarification? You’re really spoiling us!
I think it would be interesting to run the Teac disk through a disk imager setup that allows you to view the track layout for the different files. When it runs in DOS mode, it sounded like it made access noises that made it seem like it was sending the head to different positions. Of course, Windows is set up in some way to prevent that from happening -- I'm not sure if it's because the applications were sending specific commands to the disk controller to seek to certain tracks, or if it might be that there are files in specific physical locations on the disk. The Windows version probably doesn't really work with either of those possibilities, blocking direct commands to the disk and probably doing some amount of caching if it was trying to read files, but it's hard to say. Of course, whether even moving the disk head back and forth actually does anything useful is hard to say, but I bet that's the extent of what it's doing.
This is so interesting
Considering it says "Stained Head will bring data error", I would guess this was bundled with an actual cleaning disk, and that this was there to check if your floppy drive actually needed cleaning or not.
Wait, you may well be right. In other words it's just a disk to check whether cleaning is necessary.
The way Clint keep shaking the disks, "This makes sense, this doesn't", I'm reminded of the shot of Kris of *Pixelmusement* throwing a 'Don't Toss This Card' in the garbage in ADG episode 282 (only as a joke; Kris didn't actually throw it in the garbage). I keep expecting a shot of Clint throwing the Teac "cleaner" disk in the trash in a similar manner. ^_^
I kept getting Timmy's dad yelling "DINKLEBERG" vibes.
Check 4:48. The Teac disl looks like it has the abrasive track on the outer edge on the disk. More than likely the software forces the head to try to read that area of the disc to clean it.
the way it cleans the head in the drive its uses antimatter infused with gamma particle to cause a mini black hole that sucks all the dirt in :)
I'd be interested to see this (the TEAC one) run on an opened floppydrive, to see if the head does anything different than when an ordinary floppydisk is accessed...
I am way too invested in this now.
I'm suddenly reminded of DVD rewinders.
When I was young I recall having a VHS "head cleaner" tape, and I always wondered how, if at all, it worked. It looked the same as a regular VHS tape, and any difference it made was marginal at best and probably just my imagination.
I've seen those, my wife worked in a retail store that had a VCR and they were required to run this "cleaning VHS tape" once a month. Best I can tell it played a merry tune and did absolutely nothing otherwise. The VCR got progressively worse over time so it definitely wasn't cleaning it. They eventually replaced it with a DVD solution.
@@Zerbey Did the salesman sell them a "cleaning" DVD too?
@@worldcomicsreview354 Excellent question, I don't know is the answer.
The exact same MIDI was used in one of those 1990's shareware Klik&Play games, called Bat&Ball. A Breakout clone with multiple levels.
Well my wild guess is that maybe the data is written on that disk in a very specific way physically (sectors/tracks), so when the program starts it does some very heavy (or fast) movement inside, which is usually never done, so it causes more friction thus "cleaning" the head.. So the image of the disk or any copy will not work because it needs very special file placement across the disk from the factory..
I remember back in the 80's I had a disk similar to the Teac one but the inner part had small brushes on it. So the first part would tell the drive to go and rub it's head up against the brush. Ran for about 10 to 20 sec I think. Don't have it anymore and can't remember what it was called. I think it just buggered up the head anyway.
Maybe they did have a real one that has a cleaning mechanism on the part of the disk. Then someone copied its contents and transferred to a normal floppy disk.
Just like on a CD lens cleaner, it has audio on the first track then a brush thingy in it.
FYI, you can view hidden files in DOS as well -- just type dir /ah. The "ah" switch specifies "all hidden."
Gotta love DOS
It's for "attribute: hidden" actually - dir /ad only shows directories, for example :-)
@@widicamdotnet I stand corrected! Thank you.
If you want to view all files, hidden or not, you can just use the /a flag without a suffix.
@@eDoc2020 Oh, wow. I didn't even know that! Thanks for the tip!
I will say, I have several dry cleaning cassettes for several different video playback machines (VHS, Video8, MiniDV) and the tape inside all looks identical to standard cassettes containing actual video. And they all work great against dirty play heads. So part of me is not entirely convinced yet that the TEAC floppy disk is a placebo, but there isn’t really any way to tell unless it is used on a floppy drive that suffers from a dirty head.
I'll bet that Teac cleaner disk isn't a head cleaner, it's a rail "cleaner". The way the data on the disk is formatted probably forces the head to travel the whole length of the rails in the drive which would refresh the oils on the rails in cases of humid atmosphere or old slightly rusty rails. If you checked the bits layout on the disc you might even find it purposefully super fragmented across the whole data area.
That dry clean disk (the non-TEAC one) really needs some control software to move the head around otherwise it'll just absorb the cleaning agent from that track on the disk surface and leave the rest of the surface untouched and that doesn't seem very efficient. The best solution would be if they could produce a disk that contains the control software but also has the cleaning agent applied. That is, unless the cleaning agent makes the disk impossible to read of course.
I find it amusing that so many people can't accept that that head cleaner disk is just a scam. They *really want* it to be real. 😂
“I want to believe.” - Fox Mulder, _The X-Files_
I'm not dismissing the possibility that it could be fake, but i also think it's quite likely that it was originally part of a set, consisting of a data disk and an actual cleaning disk.
@@KGB240 If so, why is there absolutely zero indication of that?
The Teac is also marked as an HD disk (it is stamped onto the cassette), the Justy FD Head Cleaner doesn't have HD branded onto the disk besides the shutter...
Honestly I prefer the camera mic vs the studio mic, more a classic LGR sound
I remember downloading some shareware off a BBS that worked similar to the Teac disc. I think it was just a placebo. The drive makes noise and people think its being cleaned.
Can you remember when we could respond to a video with a video????
WOOOOOOW
And then the reply girls killed it.
It seems like a placebo and a "does my drive still read data?" kind of disk, more than anything.
i had a DAT72 backup system. the normal and cleaning tape looked identical
I wonder if (some / a specific) Teac floppy drives had some kind of cleaner built-in, that was started by this disc.
That animation with music is the original Rick Roll.
Will you also make a follow-up blerb how you clean all the floppy drives from all your computers?
I reverse engineer the programs from the earlier video, and they did absolutely nothing besides load images in some pc98 format.
Thank you. I had hoped someone would do that.That would rule out it being a bootleg of some sort of hybrid disk, as such a disk would need to do some sort of seek on the disk.
but there are some fdd sounds during "cleaning"?
@@nicklaich From what they are saying, that would just be the program accessing the files on the disk.
I had a dry CD laser cleaner that would play audio while cleaning, and it just had a small rack of bristles glued to one spot... maybe the weird disk used to have a set of bristles glued on and they just fell off?
I had a dry CD lens cleaner, It was a CD with music on it but it had a spot with brushes. It wasn't very big. I think that's what you're not seeing is a spot on that disk that is just a small section that you're not likely to see.
is it possible that floppy is made of multiple materials? like a cleaning CD that has that little brush?
Honestly, this disk seems only marginally more useful than the other one, unless you have some way of cleaning off the disk surface afterwards. You really do need a hybrid surface where most of it is just the cleaning surface, with plenty of space for lots of passes over different parts, and a program to make the head seek to some spot that's still untouched and log where it's already been. Otherwise it'll probably only work once.
This is one huge advantage head-cleaning _tapes_ have: it only takes a few seconds to do its thing, and you have potentially six hours of run time available.