This Rather Mysterious Teac 3.5" Cleaning Disk
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- čas přidán 19. 04. 2021
- ...so this is a bit of a conundrum. It's supposedly a 3.5" floppy head cleaning disk for DOS and Windows, but not the kind I'm used to using. And it happens to contain software!
Grab a disk image here: archive.org/details/teac-3.5-...
And here are those handy floppy disk holders: www.ebay.com/itm/3-5-5-25-Flo...
Wow, I didn't expect one of the 3D printed parts I made to show up on LGR. This doubly made my morning!
Good on you! Those look handy!
Are these available on thingiverse? Or is this a closed source design
@@heilong108 This isn't one of the designs I've uploaded to Thingiverse.
@@MarkMalley understood, thanks for replying
Those are clever designs.
We actually sold those Teac cleaners. There were 2 types, that one you have and another that had a sort of paper "disk" that you added fluid to and they would spin up and take some of the dirt off the heads when you did the old DIR prompt thing - snake oil or not they sold well and I have a strange memory that the sales rep said that "dry" one you have had a special coating that attracted the dirt ordinary disks would leave on the heads (like cassette heads) and because of that you didn't need fluid. And strange as it may seem they did seem to work. I would assume by now though any "coating" would have worn off/evaporated but I can confirm I got at least 2 computers working again that would not read from the A: drive using them.
...I'm almost wondering if they were initially intended to be sold as a set, with the one having the software that spins the drive and the other doing the actual cleaning, and something got fubared in the chain of communication?
There might be something to it. I mean, my first instinct was snake oil, for sure lolz, but TEAC is a reputable Japanese electronics manufacturer, would they sell something completely fake just to make some quick buck? Not that it's impossible, just seems unlikely.
That's actually pretty cool, so not entirely snake oil :D
Welp, seems like the only way to know is to track down the set you mention new old stock, which good luck with that
I also don't think this is a 100% scam - at worst an ill-advised attempt at a dry cleaning disk as you said. Perhaps a combination of data getting head to vibrate rapidly to knock any sediment off and an adhesive coating to on the disc to catch it and remove it from the system.
"Clint why are you cleaning floppy drives at 4AM?"
"Because I've lost control of my life"
That reference made me feel at least 10 years older.
It's because today is 420. Look at his clock's minute hand too
@@thomassynths so close.. yet so far
Messed up thing is I go to comment that Clint is using a compaq 425 and I see this comment (at the time I looked) has 420 likes. Wtf.
hey he's not THAT insane...
Be kind, rewind that floppy.
And dont forget to turn it over, so both sides of the head get cleaned.
I worked at University years ago, and we used brand-new 3.5 disks for cleaning.
Format the disk 3-5 times, drive is now clean!
The disk used for cleaning would get put in our 'free disk' pile.
We ran tests to compare cloth/alcohol systems and new disks....new disks always worked better for cleaning.
Since there were lots of bone-headed grad students, we taught everyone the 'new disk' trick.
Worked every time!
"The disk used for cleaning would get put in our 'free disk' pile."
Evil.
How could that possibly have any cleaning effect? Unless they were dry-cleaning type disks like what LGR showed here, then it's unlikely they would actually clean anything.
That music is The 4 Seasons by Vivaldi. In case any one was wondering
I readed "Vivaldi" and thought about the browser lol
@@FabioGnecco smfh
I wonder if it plays different sections of "Four Seasons" based on what month your computer is in?
@@matthewruley8360 Did you not watch the video? Clearly it does. Clint even commented on it.
@@JohnDCrafton I just noticed it started playing Spring, I didn't notice what month he set the computer to
LGR is more confused at the end of the video, then the beginning. I nominate this for video of the year.
than
@@Okurka. Loop
@@Okurka. Thumps up for you.
I dislike when people can't write basic English language.
And most often it's their native language.
US educational system is so bad as well as so many other things there.
Sad but true.
@@ezioauditoredafirenze8352 Did you mean “thumbs” up? Haha
Some day LGR will accidentally summon the Old Gods using a random floppy disc he found.
CTHULU_LEP_GHRR.exe
That is not dead which can eternal write. But given strange eons even even WIN_ME may die.
At least he'll be considerate enough to publish the backup on the archive first.
Can't wait!
"Plop, greetings, blerbs, whatnot"
If that isnt a ringtone, I dont know what is...
Trivago
9:33 Clint slowly descends into floppy disk madness...
10:35 - he arrived into madness
“We’re all mad here.”
@@expendableround6186 PF: DSofM?
I think it's a placebo, just like those fake cleanup apps on phones nowadays that don't actually cleanup at all.
Kudos for the effort put into the disc though. They could easily show a simple text prompt but went ahead and put full on animation and music on this thing.
But it is branded by TEAC. Maybe it is Chinese fake of course. I don't know
How else would you know it's working without the pretty animations?
Seems like it would have cost more to develop that software than it would have to actually make a head cleaning disk.
It must be a high-end audiophile drive cleaner. Nice pfp, btw. Beautiful woofer. Looks like a Klipsch.
@@hmst5420 It's totally something that would come out of Japan so I have no doubt Teac made it. If it was produced anywhere else it would be way lamer, I guarantee it
when you're out of focus, it's not LGR blerbs but LGR blurs
I don't care if it doesn't do anything. Those animations are super cute.
its to clean your mind
It’s a Japanese Cleaning Disk so of course it have to be Cute and that’s what I love about that country
My first instinct when the files didn't show up in DOS on the Windows 98 PC was "oh, they're hidden, so dir/ah".
The music is Vivaldi's Four seasons, but they're not in the right season. When the computer date is April it plays Winter and in July it plays Spring.
"dir /a" would suffice, it'll also include system files
"It is not 4 in the morning. I am not that insane". Well well I guess I'm insane.
Mark personally helped me set up my IBM 5155 with XT-IDE. He’s a great dude and makes some cool, niche products. So cool to see him featured here!
CZcams: hey, want to watch a guy being confused with an old floppy disk?
Me: kinda
Just proves we don't just watch cat videos!
He isn't just a guy. It's LGR doing a blerb!
Harumph harumph harumph!
@Cody Kamminga wait, are you not subscribed to LGR?
@@bryanjk Ofcourse I am, I’m not subscribed to the ‘Blerbs’ channel though, as I like to have something fun in my recommended once in a while
3:49 Lovely bit of broken English in the instructions: "Other Personal Computor (sic) and Word Professor" 😆
Good to see more eagle-eyes out here :D
I'm da computor professor
sick indeed
"Computor" is a legit spelling variant some people used to use back in the 70's and 80's.
@@djdjukic Before 3.5" disks.
I remember some VHS cleaners were regular tapes coated with a cleaning solution. I wonder if the same thing is going on here. If that's the case, the solution is probably long gone by now.
That label has strong "Change da world. My final message. Goodbye" energy
It really does
Clint, I think you've got 1/2 of a complete set. I didn't have this but I had something similar. This TEAC seems to be a region specific thing. What I had was a more generic floppy drive cleaner, which came with two discs: one was the traditional cleaning head, the other one came with a cleaning program, that did something similar. Basically, you would put the data disc in first, wait for it to load, and it would prompt you to insert the other disc. The loaded program would run a specific set of drive command to spin the cleaning disc.
That's what I thought too, but I didn't see another disc mentioned in the instructions or on screen.
That's probably what the "disk cleaning now begins" bit was about
nope, wrong.
0:00 LGR channeling his inner-Brutalmoose.
I don't wanna eat that, guess I gotta eat that
I like brutal moose 🌈
P l o p
They are aquainted iirc, I believe moose mentioned Clint helped him put together a pc build or similar on stream once
@@spyczech It was one of his restoration videos on his main channel. Wasn't so much of a restoration and more of a clean and factory restore. Might of been the one with the airplanes.
It really is just what it says, it's just a different type that doesn't use a cloth and fluid. The disc inside it is slightly abrasive, many tape drives used this type of cleaning material and I remember my family had a VHS head cleaner that would play video instructions and a test image while it cleaned. Being that they are abrasive you don't want to overuse them or use them needlessly though since they will wear down the heads over time.
I had a bunch of 5.25 in floppies I needed to clean a few years back (they had been stored in someone's garage so a lot of them had mold or something on them), and to make it more possible I constructed a device with my Lego Mindstorms NXT to aid me. Wish I had a picture of it, i had a retractable arm for the spindle and used one of the wheels wrapped with rubber bands to turn the disk, with a wheel with a tire being what I used to turn it with my hand. I also had the data window rest on a piece that I attached a microfiber cloth to.
From the makers of your favorite DVD rewinder. This is certainly a unique one.
Maintenance made easy. How responsible!
Imagine being the tech guy and having an ocd manager who made you run this on all the pc's in the building quarterly.
I had a boss like that, old guy, we'd just "yep" him and he'd never really ask again, if you talked back he wouldn't let it end.
I’m just old enough to have barely used some floppy disks when I was a kid, and have been watching your videos for years. This is literally the first time I learned floppy disks have an actual disk that spins inside of them. I literally just thought that the tape was a static tape that somehow held that much data, and now I feel silly :)
A tape (so long as it really was tape) that used floppy signaling would presumably hold _much_ more than any but the Floptical disks.
My guess it's working like one of those VCR head cleaning VHS tapes that show stuff on screen as it cleans. Magnetic media going across the head can usually dislodge dirt as it runs. Maybe it's doing it like that? A dry cleaner as opposed to a wet one with cloth and alcohol?
That was the great part about midi files. You could fit tons of them on a floppy disk.
And totally dependent on your sound chip. I remember games sounding awesome on my friend's PC with a real Sound Blaster and when I copied the .mid files to a floppy and took them home, they sounded like complete garbage on my budget card in my family's computer.
@@SomeDudeInBaltimore now you know why every musician pays bucketloads for a good MIDI synth :U
I haven't used a floppy disk in years, and I just watched an 11 minute video on a head-cleaning floppy. Nice job.
Time traveling troll disk from 25 years ago 😁
Are we sure its not loading some malicious software in the background?
This was so enthralling!
had it been chinese, that would have been my first thought.
The disk holder should have an insert to place a magnet in, so you can really _clean_ that diskette!
I believe that was released in a combo pack with the 'Double Your RAM' software!
The first ram doublers actually did "work", by adding paging support to operating systems (specifically DOS, as I recall) that otherwise didn't support it, presumably through the LIM standard.
Oh man, I had one of these! When I saw that cleaning boy you actually opened a part of my brain that hasn't seen the light of day for over 20 years. I haven't thought of this stupid thing for so long but I completely remember the animation now, thanks...I guess.
3:49 "OTHER PERSONAL COMPUTOR & WORD PROFESSOR" 😂😂😂
Video Professor?
@@matthewbowen5841 it's from the manual's artistic approach to English.
Based on how well the instructions were written I just expected it to install a virus.
Think it's supposed too have come with another disk that you swap out too which is why it takes a bit too load in, that second floppy is probably supposed too have those bristles on it or be copied over too the pc first before you run the program itself while having one of those cleaner bristle disks in there.
no, no and no. Just stop.
I was not prepared to love this video as much as I did but here we are.
In the floppy disc era, I bought a cleaning set that included two floppy discs and a bottle of cleaning solution. One disc had a DOS program similar to yours that you loaded into memory before using the other disc with the material for the cleaning solution to be applied. The program then stepped you through the process and provided the number of reps the disc needed to clean the head. After so many uses it had saved a use file on the program disc to prompt to replace the cleaning disc. I do not remember the brand name so can’t help with researching further info.
Speculation's already done with regards to it being the dry type of head cleaner, but it is pretty fun how they have the animations for the cleaning process, which is just pure Japanese oddness, so worthy of being a mini-oddware thing... :D
I would be really curious to see what the drive is doing internally. It almost sounds as if the files are forcing the head to move completely from side to side, perhaps you could pull a drive and take the case off and then observe it to see if the program is forcing the read/write head to behave differently than it normally would when reading a traditional disk.
If not completely snake oil, it looks like maybe an attempt to use lots of rapid movements of the internals to vibrate or shake loose anything on the heads that might be interfering with read/write (like loose dust). Definitely wouldn't do anything to get rid of anything gummy or physically stuck.
I love the Blerbs channel so much Clint, it lets me see so much more cool content from you!
The SND files have names representing the seasons in Japanese. AKI is autumn/fall (秋), FUYU is winter (冬), HARU is spring (春) and NATU is summer (夏, though written using Nihon-shiki romanisation instead of the more comon Hepburn romanisation).
I think the only thing that got cleaner was the disk inside the disk cleaner, by spinning it, thus making the disk drive itself dirtier.
Like using a cheap vacuum to clean an expensive vacuum's filter
Once the files disappeared I thought. "Please tell me he did a virus scan and it's not THAT kind of cleaner."
I really needed this video and your excitement today. Thank you soooooooooooo much.
wow those floppy disk holders make me feel like there is hope in this weary world
I didn’t know I needed this but now I’m ordering one. Oh God please send help.
The mylar disc in the disk might have a texture to it. I've seen the same thing with VHS cleaning tapes
I was gonna say it reminds of me VCR head cleaners! The blank tapes you run through the machine to clean them. Really glad you got it figured out though!
Wonderful video! Thanks so much for sharing.
I got a kick out of seeing you so confused and trying to figure out the mystery!! 😁
Using Vivaldi's 4 seasons of summer for the different seasons. How charming.
Lol at Vivaldi “Four Seasons” appropriately associated with the calendar.
Love the floppy reading noise reminds me of loading a new game on my Amiga
Like the way the cleaning mans strokes were perfectly sync'd with the disk noises
Been waiting for this since you opened it! 😂❤
LTO Cleanig Tapes for Tape Libraries are also only a kind of a blank Tape.
Vivaldi's 4 seasons. Classy touch.
Floppy discs were outdated when I was born and I have never seen anyone using them, but holy shit is this interesting.
Clint, your channels are not even nostalgia fuel. For us, Gen Z, they feel like a museum.
Mystery from the retro past :) Luv the Blerbs section!!!
Part way through I was sure it was going to be a translation error and it'd just be a disk that added a reminder to clean your house every 3 months. It just keeps getting weirder!
It's cross platform with PC-98,so cute to see some MAG file format going on :)
I was just about to say the same thing. The batch file also loads a YM2203 sound driver likely to play the music.
@@thepirategamerboy12 Pretty cool avatar, by the way ;)
@@ben8521 Thanks!
@@ben8521 Btw, you'd need a 9821 to use this "cleaning disk" since it's formatted as 1.44mb.
The Teac 4x4x32 bufferless cd burner was a legend. I burned around 3000 cd-s with it and it is still operational....somewhere in the attic :-)
thumbs up for your archiving software habit!
I know a dude who regularly interrupts his own unboxing videos with the words: "Let's have closer look at this - on the bench." :D
The head thrashed on the abrasive section of the disk to clean. You can heat that in your video on the first pass. FWIW, Teac was a major manufacturer of both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drives. I still have several of each size in my old spare parts boxes. Finally, you commented on the spelling "disc". This was much more common for 3.5" discs while disk was more common for 5 1/4 and 8 inch discs but the two spellings were used interchangeably.
Really glad this was covered.
I remember those. they were shipped with the early teac 3.5 drives. As I recall the disk surface has a special coating and the included software loaded the drive head. I think they also used a different track each time the disk was used and needed to be replaced after a limited number of cleanings.
I think you're supposed to swap the disk for one with the cloth thing after you run the exe
That would make sense, but it didn't look to me like it gave him a chance to do that.
Yeah, but it never tells you to do that.
Maybe, but it seems to start too quickly for that. It's hard to even read the text that displays before it starts, and the instructions don't mention swapping a disk out, nor do they seem to provide one. This is odd software indeed.
@@DaedalusRaistlin I had one back in the day that worked like that but it was a very simple dos program and indeed it showed a message to swap the disks.
That’s a really good theory
Vivaldi's The four seasons! LOL
The X-Files
I swear I had a copy of one of those I picked up at a PC show in either King of Prussia, PA or AC, NJ a long time ago. ...long time.
So much nostalgia...
i had one of these boys in the days
the tiny little brush floppy round disk is unlike any other but it works on the disk header stuff legit an amazing tech
I went into this expecting it to be something like CCleaner for 1994 but I'm left more confused than informed.
**FLOPPY HEAD CLEANER**
*dramatic music blaring*
This is so reminiscent of your review of Goat Simulator. That's the video that got me started with you way back when.
Used to have one many year sago that had data on it, and it did clean, but you could physically hear that it had some sort of an abrasive coating on the disk as it sounded rough when rotating in the drive. The one I had just had a countdown timer on the screen in a very large font, the sector and track it was cleaning and number of times the disk had been used, nothing as fancy as this!.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. Who's up for some "Secret of Monkey Island"?🤷♂️
So if the software doesn't do anything useful it can at least be nice to look at and listen to. Or so the developers thought.
Yeah! 🌈
And they were right!
I could listen to those floppy drive sounds all day long. Also, guess I’m insane since I’m up after 4 in the morning.
The thumbnail preview is an infinite loop of putting the disk in, turning it, taking it out...
I was in a moment of deep thought when it caught my eye...
I became mesmerised by it...
I must have stared at it for ten minutes before I got snapped back to reality
Holy shit
Any chance this is a clone product where they took the software from a real one but just put it on a normal floppy? Could have been a rip off back in the day.
The software looks very similar to one we had back in the day (minus the Japanese text), difference was ours actually had bristles on the disc, towards the centre(?).
If I was a virus coder, I'd use such a disk to get it on your computer 😄
Hmmmmm.....Ok buddy
I used to service vcr's and there were such things as VHS cleaning cassettes that looked just like normal tape, but you only play it for 10 seconds, and they did actually work if the heads were slightly dirty. The surface of the tape was just very, very slightly abrasive but you couldn't see it. Maybe that's how this disc worked.
I have a cleaning disk, it's not currently in my house, but one thing i do remember clearly, is that the material of the disk had been replaced with a felt pad and that the mechanism for the shutter was completely gone (including the track, so it wasn't just removed) only the recess remaining. It came in one of those "blister" packages that you could slide the cardboard out of, and it came with a eyedrop sized cleaning solution. I also vaguely remember that in the instructions it said that it would work only for the duration of the "prescribed" drops, and you were supposed to drop a decent amount at the four lines indicated in the felt pad (a cross).
I mean, it worked, certainly i revived my Sharp printer and writer's reading unit with it a few years ago. It kept returning error, i remembered i had this thing and i tried it, like nothing to lose, right? And it worked, i was able to use the floppy.
I have a similar product but for CDs and there's a tiny little brushed glued unto the disk about half way through an usual write cycle. That one i've no idea if it works or if it came with anything besides the CD case (no instructions, just a fonty title).
Trust the Japanese to come up with software that leaves Clint speechless.. :D (I assume that the language is Japanese at any rate)
Yeah, that's Japanese.
The fact that it shows the Yen symbol shows it was optimized for the Japanese market.
😂
How odd! You should disassemble the exe files and see if you can tease out what it's actually doing.
Agreed! Disassembly time!
That little 3D printed disk opener rotator cleany thing is pretty cool. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I am of the generation that had hundreds of 5 1/4 and thousands of 3.5 floppies. My guess is that dirty disks became more of a problem recently with the resurgence of interest in rehabbing old computer gear. So you’ll have a lot more floppies in bad shape needing cleaning. Wasn’t as much of a problem back when the disks were all new and not being stored in an attic or garage or shed.
Such a gadget might have existed back in the day, but I never saw or heard of one.
I had a similar type for a VHS recorder, that had what looked like a normal tape. You put it in and press play, and wait until the picture on screen because "cleaner" as the tape cleaned the head, so was pretty cool You actually get to 'see' the effects of the cleaning as it happens.
That is _weird,_ dude. Definitely seems like some sort of placebo, but the fact that it came from an otherwise reputable company, just... Wow.
How do you know what company it came from? If it’s just because it says “Teac” on the label... that’s not really a guarantee that it came from Teac...
Assuming the label isn't a fake...
Thats the weirdest of the blerbworld. Highly doubt that has anyhing to do with TEAC... plot twist: it installs a virus while bedazzling you with vivaldi 😂
Lol I had one of those when I had my 386 and 486 DX2 66 and it's meant to "realign" you're reading head to "check" to see if it needs physical cleaning or just a reading head realignment. It's a diagnostic tool only. Not an actual drive head cleaner. Thanks for the nostalgia trip mate 👍. The seasons are just so you can do you're anual PC "cleaning" with your house cleaning 😂. It's TEAC brand after all! 😁
Didn't think we'd see a video about it this soon
>placebo head cleaner disk comes in two languages
>does not have a secret cherry blossoms mode for April
SHAME, SHAME, SHAME
80’s “snake oil” device? Still very interesting vid as always, thanks 👍
90's. 80's was 5" floppys (that were floppy). and no snake oil.
I remember buying similar dry VHS cleaners when I was younger for the VHS players in my parents minivans. Did it whenever the sound started going out and they always seemed to get the audio working again for a good few months before it'd go back out again. I was 3 years old, so maybe it didn't work as well as my nostalgia tells me, but oh well. They always had some weird animation and music it played while it was cleaning and always would be like "now cleaning left audio channel" and what not. We'd buy them from a Walgreens or CVS and just plop them in and run them.
DOS trick: use " dir /a /w " to show files will all attributes (HSRA) in a wide listing. See " dir /? " for more information, and " help dir " for too much information.
early coding days... Doing anything to get people to inject code into their machines!
Imagine if that were a virus! An ancient virus, not detectable as such...lol This video literally had me laughing out loud Clint, there was a detectable nervousness in your voice! 🤣
No one should have ever doubted you checked for fir on the disc, then you break out those great cleaners!
I think you’re supposed to swap to a cleaner disk while it’s doing the animation, just a guess
Oh wow. I had one of these back in 97 or 98 with a UK company called Linear Computers, the instructions that came with it said it should only be used occasionally to avoid wearing the drive heads. And disc is more common this side of the pond btw!