Testing 100 Broken Floppy Disks – Are They Really Damaged?

this is going to be so much fun this is the most exciting video i've ever created in my entire life look at all of these floppy disks that we get to go through and check every single one of them i am so excited i have never done a video in my entire life hello everybody and welcome back to another video now in today's video as you guys saw from that little intro clip it's gonna be more of an interesting video because we're going to be revisiting that set of 100 broken floppy diskettes that i purchased and took a look at in this video right here it'll be up in the cards if you want to go check it out now why did i purchase these well really just to make that video i wanted to see what this was all about i knew i was going to get 100 broken floppy diskettes but i didn't know what was going to be contained on those discounts or what was formally contained on those discounts i didn't know what labels they were going to have if they were all going to be in nice physical shape like these here if they were going to be like these are floppy disks that were sold or provided with software originally on them all of these in here were sold blank and then somebody put their own data onto them i was also thinking about tacking these up on the wall behind me to make a nice little backdrop for these videos which is something that i may still do but i want to revisit these in this video because i got a lot of comments on that previous video of you guys saying why don't you just try this anyway see if these really are broken so that's what we're going to be doing in today's video we're going to be going through every single one of these i'm going to be popping them into the 5 windows 98 pc because we haven't used that computer in a while and we're going to see if any of these work see if we can read data off of them or copy data over to them all right everybody so here we are we've got a fresh install of windows 98 on the windows 98 pc and we're going to be doing this one a little bit differently because we're going to be doing a time lapse and the reason i'm doing that is because well there are a lot of discus to go through and again my theory is none of these are going to work but if one of them does work we're going to pause the time lapse and we're going to take a look at what's on and see if we can write files over to it now remember in that last video i mentioned that or well you guys saw if you watched it that we got a couple of physically damaged diskettes yeah so we've got a a few discounts not a whole lot but a few that are physically damaged so we're not going to be able to take a look at every single one of these obviously because i don't want to put a physically damaged diskette into this floppy disk drive but most of them are physically intact we just have to figure out if the data on them is and that's what we're going to be doing right now so we've got one camera on the computer monitor one camera on the floppy disk drive on the front of the computer and a third camera on the stacks of floppy diskettes that i'm going to be going through so you guys can see exactly how far along that i am so without any further ado let's get started [Music] all right guys well three disc gets in and uh one of them actually works this was labeled free ram i believe and we're going to just let's see if we can copy one of these files this looks like an image a pcx document let's see if we can copy this to the desktop this is the first one that has actually been able to read files off the disk it could still be corrupted this doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work the activity light is on full time and it hasn't even come up with a copy prompt at all but we can see the files on the disk although if we cannot uh you know take the files off the disk head or or add files to it that's definitely a problem see this looks like command.com right yep command.com oh it's copying will it copy to the desktop nope cannot copy the system cannot read from the specified device so this one this disk is definitely corrupted actually this one has no label on as you can see but we're going to set this one aside and we'll move on with the time lapse all right so i went ahead and booted off of a windows 95 boot disk just to make everything go a little bit smoother so we just have to run a dir command on the a drive to see if it's able to pull files off of it or we'll read files off of it and this next disk right here does at least it starts to but then it fails with a general failure reading drive a [Music] well it looks like we have another contender here this one is labeled documents christmas list candles candles i think and map skill worksheets and this does have like when i did a directory listing it read the files on it so can we copy let's just try to copy we'll do poo dot pcc to the c drive here and we'll see if it copies sector not found reading drive a so nope that does not work so so much for that but we've got three discounts now that we can actually i mean we can read the files off if we just cannot copy them off of the drive well we just had two back to back this is our fourth diskette now that is we actually read the files off of now the this get is labeled 3d studio 4 and the drive label is cracked so i'm assuming that this is a pirated piece of software uh so what we're going to do is we're going to try to copy this 3d4 dot exe file to the c drive and press enter and we'll see if it's able to copy it and there's our data error reading drive a so on to our next diskette [Music] uh and we got another one here this one is labeled windows nt 3.1 setup disk for cd-rom uh it's another copied disk this is not an original one obviously but we do have a lot of sys files on here so let's just do a dir slash w a wide directory listing and yeah so we've got yeah a bunch of sys files volume and drive a is disk one so let's try to copy um let's see here arrow dot sys a-r-o-w dot s-y-s to the c drive not the f-drive the c drive and sector not found reading drive a once again and we've got another one uh this one right here is there was no label like no sticker on it there's 51 files on it it is oh i had to cross this one out i think this had someone's name on it but uh that's that's what it was it's disc four or four uh it might be like a backup or something like that well we've got this d-link.nfo so let's try to copy i it's still a reading here copy d-link dot n-f-o to the c-drive sector not found once again all right so we'll add this to the pile and move on to the next one and we have another one this one right here is another uh copy of something there's actually no writing on it whatsoever there is one directory on it called zip so maybe something to do with a zip disk possibly let's uh let's go into that directory and this is also we're through one of our stacks here you can see on this camera over here so we're in the zip directory uh what do we got in here we have a zip file arj two arj files and a jpeg so let's try to copy the jpeg so that's gonna be b uh b i k i n i s three oh bikini bikinis three dot jpeg g i wonder what that one is uh we'll copy that to the to the c drive okay so that's yeah so uh data error reading drive a once again well that's unfortunate we'll go ahead and pop this one out add it to the this is our seventh disc actually where we can read the files off of it so we're going to pop in another one atlas pro data 305 see if we can read the files off this [Music] one [Music] looks like we got another one here this one interesting chicago.inf and a setup.exe is this a windows beta uh no it is oh this is the hp laserjet printing software the hp laserjet 6l printing software i assume this is the driver uh yeah i saw chicago.inf i was like i wonder if this is a windows beta like for windows 95 but no it is not it's an hp at least maybe it is i don't know we're going to copy setup.exe so copy setup.exe i'm doing this with one hand here you'll have to forgive me copy setup.exe to the c drive and it's reading i'm probably gonna get that same as yeah sector not found reading drive a so we'll uh fail and your files copied all right so moving on oh another one here although this one is making uh you can probably hear that sound there it's making which is not a good sign um but it is able to read off of it this is drive copy yeah drive copy by powder quest corporation so this one again we can see the files on it can we actually copy anything off of it though we'll do the readme dot text to the c drive it's probably gonna fail once again yep sector not found we're eating driveway [Music] oh we got another one here that we were able to get it to read can we do a directory listing yes we can good pe tild1.rtf so let's see what is this labeled good people rtf file all right well let's see what good people let's see what this file is so let's see if we can copy it and the answer is no oh and we got another one back to back here uh this one oh never mind data error being drive a um well we were able to do a directory listing then it immediately gave us a data error we'll do that again uh yes it will so this one oh this is magic scan [Music] oh check that out all right 55 files turned us to the a prompt this one is called windows 3.1 disk number four all right well we got a windows installation here uh so let's do a wide directory listing and let us copy hmm what do we want to copy msd.exe copy msd.exe to the c drive nope that ain't gonna work and we got another one here another two back to back this might actually be another windows 3.1 setup discount let's see let us see this one's called links1 all right so put that one back in here let's try to copy links dot cfg one file copied oh looks like we have is this microsoft golf golf.exe golf.exe to the c drive so i was able to copy links.cfg because that's at the very beginning of the disk you try to go in ways to golf.exe it fails on that data error reading drive a so we were able to copy gaul or this links.cfg file though but we're going to add to the same pile of a disk that i have down here and we'll move on [Music] okay this one is working as well lba.003 it's probably like a part of a setup uh diskette package or something uh relentless that's what this is called relentless so let's let's see just how relentless it is we'll copy l b a dot zero zero three we could just done star.star as well since it's the only file on here well this copy nope it will not okay another one here works this one is labeled immortal gosh what are these disk names immortal um harpoon.exe all right copy oh yeah our point.exe can data error reading drive a all right that's unfortunate [Music] another one here man we've got a couple of these that are that are working what is this one called uh oh this had someone's name on it that i crossed out um so we've got unzip pk exe all right we'll try that data error reading driving okay this is one of those canon diskettes you may be able to see it right there uh so let's try to copy lpt.vxd uh to the c drive [Music] my guess is this ain't gonna work nope it's not going to all right let's try our other canon printer drive here this is the exact literally the exact same disc these are the ones that are they're both two of two so we'll try this one and see if this one works and that one doesn't even work at all oh all right this is one of the norton diskettes we'll see if it returns us to the a prompt um yes it will okay let me show you this is uh norton utilities for windows 95 emergency disk one so we've got startup.exe we have config.sys let's try to copy startup.exe and we'll see if this copies general failure reading drive a not gonna work all right well good news we've got another one this uh the drive label is install this is plug and play configuration manager for ms-dos and windows 3.1 there's no company name or anything like that so this was this probably been bundled with a piece of hardware or something we will copy let's say readme.com into the c drive sector not found all right and this is that chuck e cheese disc that i found very interesting um yeah this is the pizza time theater i think this is like a i mean it says show three 2017 um probably for like a show computer as it says right here introducing the disc drive and reboot the show computer so this was probably used on a computer for something at chuck e cheese i don't know let's see if this one works i was really interested in oh my gosh it actually works okay well it doesn't necessarily mean it works can we copy well let's see if we can we edit autoexec.bat actually i don't think ms-dos edit is going to think yeah a bad command or file name okay can we copy it uh no i don't wanna overwrite the existing one um how about okay let's try apr 17 dot easy exe okay one file copied huh so this one my guess is this disk is bootable because there's an autoexec.bat a command.com there's one exe file we're going to try at the end of this video to boot off of this because we're able to copy that one file so this one may work it might not but it might and so we're going to try this one at the very end of the video but for now we've got a little bit of yeah we've got like probably 10 15 discounts here to go through so we're going to go through those okay we've got two back to back here this one is this was a microsoft diskette actually yeah c6 run lib as you can see well it turns us to the a prompt this is microsoft windows software development kit c 6.0 runtime library so let us try to copy um install.bat one file copied okay um let's try to copy the lib folder to try to copy this entire folder and now that ain't going to work so this one again install.bat is at the very beginning of the diskette the lib is not so only part of like the the entire i mean it's still able to read this and still able to copy that although will it be intact uh i don't know but uh trying to copy this lib folder does not work [Music] well that's all of them everybody so what we're going to do now is well first of all let me just show you how many disc gets out of those we were able to so again we started with a hundred we had a hundred diskettes we had probably about i think 15 that were physically damaged and out of all of those the ones that were not physically damaged we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 diskettes that we were able to uh read files off of we were able to see the contents of the disk but we were not able to copy well some of these i think at least two or three of these we were able to copy files off of one part of the discount but not the other because the the entire disk was not fully intact but i'm interested in this one right here this is again that chuck e cheese diskette we're gonna try to pop it into the drive and we're gonna reboot and see if it's able to to boot off of this because it appears that this is a bootable disk there's an autoexec.bat on there um and a command.com so we're going to see if we can boot off of this because this would be really interesting to see what this is cannot load dos press key to retry starting caldera dr dos oh my gosh that's a name i've not heard in a while okay we've got a self-extract utility on here show three 2017 update finished uh remove disk and reboot the computer so we'll remove the disk and restart i mean this is just going to load us back into windows 98 i would think maybe we'll have some like chucky cheese files on there now so okay out of those 100 one worked so that's interesting but you saw the first time we tried to boot off of this it said that it couldn't find dos if the camera will focus here it said he couldn't find dos we restarted then it was able to boot up into again caldera dr dos yeah so one out of 100 literally one of these worked so all right pretty awesome now we'll see what files it copied i am really interested now and seeing what what exactly this is so it's going to my computer here here's norton antivirus going to come up and complain about your virus protection is 188 days old you know i think it's a little bit older than that just just throwing that out there so it copied stuff to the c drive i assume yeah here's that install.bat file that we copied from that other diskette and this appears to be fully intact so that's good oh what is this cyb yeah this was the this was the folder that it created so what is this is there an executable in here there's not but these files 12.2 kilobytes cyb i don't know what that stands for oh cec yeah cec is chuck e cheese so this is like a proprietary file format but that is interesting yeah that's really interesting that uh that this diskette worked i mean we can try let's uh pop it back in the reason that i did all of this in ms-dos mode is because windows typically completely freezes up when there's a like i i had sorted this in windows and a few of those diskettes i mean well i started to put them in and then it wouldn't do anything like explorer would lock up literally and you'd have to force eject the drive and then in some cases just reboot the entire computers it would just freeze up windows this is doing the same thing so it's inflating these files here cyb and there's all these cec files so it looks like it's first extracting them all to the a drive that's exactly what it's doing it's extracting them all to the a drive and then it's probably going to copy them cyber yeah c-y-b-s-t-a-r dot cfg so there's a couple of cec well most of these are cec files and then some of them are sch which for some reason i want to say screen saver but that's scr let me look up i i assume this is a proprietary file format i'm going to look up file info and that is not a file type according to file info either so these are both proprietary file formats so show three 2017 update finish i mean this is certainly not from the year 2017 although maybe it is do you think chuck e cheese would have used floppy diskettes up until 2017. that is an interesting question anyone out there and i know i said this in the last video but if any of you guys work at chuck e cheese uh you would know this first hand i mean i didn't really think before when i saw this i was like oh 2017 that's probably just like some version number or something maybe maybe it's the year maybe floppy disks are still used at chuck e cheese for whatever these shows are well it's obviously something with a computer i don't think it would be with the animatronic maybe this is with the animatronics maybe this is the program that controls the animatronics i don't know man i'm gonna have to do like a whole video on this now oh my gosh i was right this was modified this was modified in 2016. look at that modified 2013 2016 and this is not the date of the system the system date is set to 2000 august of 2000. this is like from a few years ago that's crazy so chuck e cheese i just dropped in here so chuck e cheese is still using floppy disks for whatever this is in 2017 and may still be today was obviously not manufactured in 2017 but it was used maybe it was purchased from floppydisk.com by chuck e cheese to like store this i don't know but that's very interesting that's going to wrap it up for today's video i hope you guys enjoyed this one this was a really interesting one for me to make and i'm really excited that one of these worked and it was the disc i was most curious about in that last video but if you guys enjoyed this one if you want to see videos uh like this in the future be sure to give this one a thumbs up be sure to get subscribed down below turn on those channel notifications if you haven't already to get notified whenever i upload a new video which i do multiple times every single week on this video which i do multiple times every single week on this channel and as always guys i want to thank you all so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Michael MJD

Views: 126,151

Keywords: video, michaelmjd, mjd7999, game, review, overview, apple, microsoft, unboxing, tutorial, windows, how-to, mac, os, operation, system

Id: eIJVc06N4zg

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020