I Bought 100 Broken Floppy Disks. Here's Why!

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Title says it all. Yes, I purchased 100 broken 3.5 inch floppy disks. In this video I talk about why, and we see just what random assortment of disks I ended up with.
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#MichaelMJD #Windows #FloppyDisks

[@dquad]

My momma always said "Life is like a box of floppies, you never know what you're gonna get"

[@BertGrink]

HA! I was thinking the exact same thing.

[@hampoon]

You do know that tho

[@bland9876]

if there's one thing i've learned after 21 years it you're never gonna know what on that floppy

[@djfernando16]

My mom used to say: Life is like a box with a cat and a radioactive vial. You never know if the cat is dead or alive. (Maybe you shouldn't wait for the cat to starve to death.)

[@araarathisyomama787]

Michael MJD: "I Bought 100 Broken Floppy Disks. Here's Why!" Me: I DON'T NEED SLEEP, I NEED ANSWERS

[@dedsecpetrikov]

its 3 pm and i havent slept .

[@lauriekimani]

@@dedsecpetrikov pm/am?

[@araarathisyomama787]

@@lauriekimani well maybe pulled an all nighter

[@TechHug]

YOU WANT TEETH, I WANT ANSWERS!

[@jaezcorp]

That's a lot of SAVE button action figures!

[@BertGrink]

lol

[@Damaniel3]

They're listed as 'broken', but have you tried actually popping any of these into a disk drive to see what happens? I wonder if any of them can be refurbished somehow.

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

they run them all though a demag

[@ZakTDuck]

Especially those Mac discs, there's no way those would work out of the box on Windows/MSDOS box.

[@samuelthecamel]

Some of them might just have physical damage and the actual disk is okay, but I'm pretty sure they would wipe all the data off them anyways

[@mattjw16]

Yes, I would also like to see him try to put them into a drive and see if they can be ran. It would make a good experiment video!

[@joes9954]

That Chuck E. Cheese disk would be the first one I'd look at. Very curious.

[@ChaddRussell]

Maybe some of them work. They might be a part of the "we don't want to clean and format them" pile.

[@pompshuffle562]

I thought about that but if floppy disks are in such short supply I can't really see they basically throwing away untested disks.

[@pompshuffle562]

I do wonder if they could be repaired somehow but I doubt it

[@knightcrusader]

I would assume a lot of those ones without shutters work. You don't need the shutter to use them, but they probably pitched them since they couldn't sell them.

[@pompshuffle562]

@@knightcrusader the only thing is that is for protection of the disk inside and that raises the chance of the actual floppy part of the disk to be damaged

[@clothinghanger6978]

The Mario Teaches Typing discs had no label, they were actually printed directly into the plastic (I think) so they probably had no way to remove the print, so called all three "broken"

[@ncot_tech]

If you're going to put them on a wall as a backdrop, consider attaching them to a large picture frame or board. Hot glue works well for that. I'm thinking they could be fun used as a table top, with some clear resin poured over the top. I bet that website has a special whole section of their warehouse just for AOL and CompuServe disks 😉

[@RealBega]

imagine if some of them actually work lol

[@jamesmiddleton4741]

It's possible

[@christoffer4862]

Either they are physically broken or just have data corruption. Hopefully most of the files still work though. And removing the magnetic disk from the shell and inserting it into another is really easy if you do it from the bottom.

[@GendoPrime]

I bet those word perfect clipart disks work, I find it hard to believe all 7 disks don't work.

[@Reziac]

Yeah, as an occasional WordPerfect collector... I'm sitting here salivating and hoping they're still good... would be very odd if all 7 were busted.

[@sriramsundar8388]

In this quarantine, I find your videos the most interesting dude! Keep it up.

[@enzonolastname1181]

13:28 I ask my friend about this disk sense he is a really big cec fan and he said that it was most likely used to start up the computer to run the animatronics most likely didn’t have a show on it because the shows were stored on vhs/cassette tapes

[@askhowiknow5527]

It’s weird when a technology gets cheaper and lower quality at the end of its life and people remember as being unreliable when it really wasn’t and didn’t have to be

[@PrincessAshly]

Man I would love to have that Chuck E. Cheese floppy! That's so cool man.

[@SYIBOI]

I always forget how elegant of a design floppy disks had and there was something very satisfying about using one, but man aside form ripping these up to make weird art installations I cannot think of any practical uses for broken ones. I almost wonder if there's a way to fix them or if its the disk itself thats damanaged.

[@reggierc8170]

the chuck e cheese floppy disk was used in the studio C show, studio C is the show with just the 1 robot. all the floppy disc was used for was updating the robots movements. once that was installed it was removed. The show then ran on 2 dvd players. one was for video and audio, the other dvd was for the light show and the movement of the robot for the show.

[@Chickenpatty878]

It's like 100 broken floppys when all you need is a CD

[@SomeNot]

More like 500 disks for 1 cd.

[@vlOd_yt]

MJD: *Posts an video* Me to the youtube app: *let me in LET ME INNNNNNN*

[@Eyetrauma]

0:46 I’m not sure why but that swooping sfx was like that ‘knocking on the door’ effect where it sounds like it’s right nearby, freaked me out

[@macinman]

Would have been fun to go through and look at some of the old software, if the disks were still good. Especially if you had a supported computer. One of the things I like more than seeing what's new with the latest tech, is to go back through history and revisit software / hardware I grew up with, or even stuff before I was born. In my particular case, most things I would revisit, were mainly things I either used at one point, or just never had access to. Great video.

[@blainepalmerza]

Awesome video, Michael!

[@kbhasi]

Cool! Personally, I use broken floppy disks to test the physical mechanisms on floppy disk drives before I entrust them with my functioning disks. 13:18 I imagine that the "show computer" was a PC wired up to a box that controlled the animatronics, and so the disk would either be a bootable disk that loaded DOS and immediately launched into the animatronic control software, or the PC had some embedded storage device containing a stripped-down version of DOS or Windows, suppressed Program Manager or the Explorer shell, and immediately launched into the animatronic control software, set to check the floppy drive for project files to load and automatically run. At this point, it's reminding me of when I visited a club my aunt was a member of back in the mid 2000s, along with other people in my family, and we went into a karaoke room, but the player was a PC that ran Windows 98 SE in Simplified Chinese, which would load up and automatically log in and launch a desktop session like normal, with lots of application shortcuts and other files on the desktop (3 columns in either VGA or SVGA resolutions), before immediately launching into the karaoke software which suppressed the Explorer shell. That was on the smaller control monitor, but the large TV to the left of it would only receive a signal when a video was selected, so it wasn't using the native Windows "multiple monitors" functionality. 14:02 So when they got their Palm Pilot back in the day, they received quite a few disks in the box, it seems, before Palm included the software on CD-ROM and a Web download with later models. 7:56 I used Kid Pix too, but it was the later "Kid Pix Studio" for Windows XP.

[@TubbyJ420]

6:49 Jaz drives! I remember seeing a 2gb version at my friends around 1998 and being amazed at the storage space.

[@xmaniac99]

What version is the Jaz drive install ? I may be interested in a copy of that floppy.

[@erxer1]

You should order more of these. This was a really interesting video!

[@PieFights]

5:51 Oh wow I had that version of Reader Rabbit a long time ago for me c64 c

[@troyvanheer3827]

@Michael MJD Really enjoyed your video, it was very thorough, professional and entertaining. Try out at least some of the floppy disks and see what happens. I know that they were sold as broken, but you never know until you try. Keep up the good work! 😉

[@SwissArmyTin]

Re: the Chuck E Cheese thing. I'm surprised those disks are 3.5", the Showbiz Rock Afire Explosion characters were all ran off Apple IIe's and 5.25" unidisk drives.

[@ZumbeeYTB]

It’s actually wild seeing the Pizza Time Theater branding on there, because this disk was for the Studio C show, as labelled on the side, and that logo was long discontinued before that became a thing

[@theretromillennial]

Cool deal. It's always fun to go down the nostalgia road and see things like an AOL or IBM disk.

[@cyberdusttv]

I'd definitely try and pop some into a drive just to see if they can be somehow salvaged.

[@krzbrew]

In 2014 I recycled 140 floppies our company still had since 1995. If I knew I could have sent them to you.

[@ebridgewater]

$23 for 100 broken floppy disks 😲

[@retrotony4119]

I recently read an article that talked about how some of our nuclear launch systems in the military, still uses floppy’s for their computer systems. Reassuring, considering how often these media storage devices fail at the wrong times.

[@tegrqbruh4158]

I'd try to restore them if the disks inside were in good shape

[@thefrecklepuny]

"Check this out...DOD top-secret MS Word file..." "OPEN UP, THIS IS THE FBI!!!!

[@kernel_data_inpage_error]

To everyone saying that some of them "might" work, they may have magnetic damage (was a pretty easy one to get, placing it over the PC speakers or a telephone and some sectors will corrupt)no matter how you try to format it, you will get a disk unusable error, thats because the drive can't even find where the disk starts and where it ends, the magnetic film needs to be recalibrated on a factory

[@ForgottenMachines]

Do you do any work with capturing the flux transitions from your "unreadable" floppies? I do, and usually recover most of them when I do this! I have videos about this on my channel!

[@connorm955]

I don't use floppy disks, but i bid on some Maxell MF2HD disks and won to test out the floppy drive in the Dell Dimension 8400 i bought a month ago. The box hints the floppies where from the frequent buyer program. They are still in working order as well.

[@slashtiger1]

Here's a nice idea for a video: take the disks that have software on them, see if you can find other copies of the software in question and take a look at the software in other videos...

[@Otto1871]

Hi Keep up the great work I love your videos

[@TrevAndDust]

An easy backdrop could be to build a simple frame out of 1x2's, back it with thin plywood, then you could attach the floppies to the frame. You could paint the frame or wrap it in fabric. Then you can just attach the frame to the wall, but you can move it around also if needed. And you don't end up sticking 100 floppies to your wall haha.

[@DavidWonn]

Some of my PCs only have floppy drives as options for external media, including a 386DX40 desktop, an IBM PS/2 tower, and a Pentium 75 laptop. Thankfully I acquired several floppy disks that were being thrown away from former employers, so I can definitely see the need for having them. Oh and my PS/2 and P75 laptop themselves were also throwaways from those jobs as well, and the 386 was a $5 find in a thrift store eons ago.

[@linuxameteur]

this was the worst time for hell -school- to start

[@TheTechnoGuy18]

for me it starts on september 14th AAAAAAAAA

[@floridaman7009]

Why am I prisoner of this hell

[@Patrikch100]

I gradueted on June 26th so ... no more school 😂

[@thescreemregular5168]

*coffin dance* Dingus dingus DINGUS

[@BlueYogurt_]

You should do a video where you test these disks. I’ve seen people buy things that say for parts or not working and they do work. Would be very interesting to see

[@darkguardian1314]

I still have some floppy disks going back to 1993. Only half are still readable. Many are reformatted disks with different capacities.

[@Miasmark]

some of the game ones appear to be in really good shape. Is there any way to replace the faulty magnetic surface without completely messing up the casing?

[@TomokoAbe_]

Most of my floppies still work. Some don't, but most do. They were used mid-1980's. It surprises me the 5-1/4" ones are a lot more stable than the smaller ones.

[@batteryman2852]

Just notice something , 8:03 : Those spring like the one laying on the table, isn't that the same springs they use in ps3 controllers?

[@Kundalini12]

I'd be tempted to see if some of these disks work.

[@JessicaFEREM]

I want to see the wall-art being made, def

[@olepigeon]

12:56 That disk could be ProDOS formatted for an Apple II. I watched a documentary about how they did the shows, and the whole thing is controlled by an Apple II computer with a 3.5" floppy drive. Yes, you read that right. An Apple _II_ with a 3.5 drive, not a Macintosh, and not the usual 5.25" drive. It was rare, but some people did have 3.5" controller cards for their Apple IIs. For the life of me, I can't find the video on KZbin anymore.

[@guilhermealbertodemoraes7970]

This reminds me my disket back from my youth, with a little skull drawn at the label... If I had it today, I'd provably frame it and expose somewhere in home 😄

[@y.bowcat7782]

finna buy some of these and an old floppy case to use as coasters, e-cycling ftw

[@Halterung01]

Did you try some of them? Not every floppy is dead just because it can't be resold. I guess there are a few that were either used on a misaligned drive (hit them with a tape eraser or head demagnetizer) or ones that just have a single bad sector or something which would be automatically marked as bad during format (of course making them unusable for imaging) Only if Track 0 is dead, the floppy is dead.

[@thomasburns1846]

Where I work, we have boxes of floppy discs, Some are software/driver discs, some still have proprietary information. We have older plastic injection molding machines, CNC milling machines and CNC wire EDM machines that rely on floppy discs.

[@thecaptain2281]

@Michael MJD You should try testing some of those discs. I'll bet some of them work, just maybe have a small issue that made them unsuitable for sale as a reconditioned floppy. Yeah do a follow up video!

[@fiverZ]

Where do they source the old disks?

[@matthewrease2376]

Aw man, the ones with hand writing are the coolest! Especially when they work...

[@DvdXploitr]

I wonder if some of those disk sets have working discs in them. Like maybe Disk 1 of Mario Teaches Typing doesn't work but maybe Disk 2 and 3 would work? Be interesting to test them out

[@Ben333bacc]

Plain black with white text... "Microsoft C 6.0 Runtime Libraries, That's a pretty cool one." Lmao

[@mjdxp5688]

Haha, this is really neat, it's kind of like opening up a pack of Pokémon cards I guess!

[@ifesbobthekillerpolarbear2013]

I actually remember kidpix from elementary school, which for me was the second half of the 00s and early 10s. I actually got Kidpix 4 working on my old computer a bit ago

[@mischiefloki]

The Playroom diskette also brought back memories of 'Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?' Those were the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.

[@-GameHacKeR-]

You should test those floppies for yourself to see if all them don't read or write at all, Glue dots would probably be the best way to stick them up on the wall. You'd want to use a good few per floppy on that kinda wall though.

[@matthewrease2376]

Kid Pix Deluxe, on Win 95 and Mac OS... I spent so many hours on that at Grandma's house before she finally let me keep it. Good years...

[@Sarahmint]

You never explained why other "then to resell them" and never explained why after that

[@beyondcatastrophe_]

He said he wants to do a channel project with it... Edit: he even explains at 16:40

[@typingcat]

12:57 I love legitimate the-ay-tre.

[@MorriganQueen451]

Oh man, it's so sad to see something like this. all the stuff, just lost, only leaving an empty shell behind.

[@cococarranza3613]

You should try putting some of these in a disk drive and see if any of them work? This is bugging the hell out of me not knowing

[@TubbyJ420]

The Chuck E Cheese disk is a perfect example of legacy hardware still using floppies. Pizza Time Theatre is that creepy animatronic band from the 70s. Somewhere, a location was still using the system in 2017.

[@NuffMan_]

Put tape over the hole, turn them into 740kb disks. I have gotten majority of my bad disks working again with this trick. But i only use them for non important stuff

[@JessicaFEREM]

how many more floppies before we can say mjd has a floppy hoarding problem

[@Ampersand100]

900 more would definately be a problem. :-)

[@skyegamein]

the chuck e cheese floppy is likely from 2017

[@JaminWarrenPMS]

you should try some out because some of those the broken part is the fact it has a label on it and the removal process isn't worth the profit margin.

[@justinbuckley]

Why did you buy a package of broken save icons?

[@thatkindofboi9955]

til what's inside of a floppy disk thx michael mjd really epic

[@MarkTheMorose]

Glue the backs of 'good' disks to pieces of acrylic sheet, cut into the shapes M, J, and D, and cover with a top sheet of acrylic?

[@musicalneptunian]

When I was in early High School in 1987 I absolutely remember floppy disks. There was a brand called Verbatim. They were circular floppy disks used for an Apple 2 e. They had a small hole/gap in the middle of the disk. If you put them into the Apple 2 e's disk drive the wrong way up there was this hideous noise like an alarm/vacuum cleaner. I never kept those disks. But I do have some working square ones from a science lab. They are called crystal disks and they're on my shelf in a box. The last time I used software on a floppy disk was in the mid 90's when a University math DOS program came with the class textbook.

[@MishraArtificer]

I think Verbatim's still around...I've seen their name on something at my local store, at least.

[@sebastianmonjes1651]

Duuuude Just went into this video cause where i work (sorting and separating trash for recycling) we had some stuff that came from a few banks, sometimes we are allowed to take a piece of trash if it isnt gonna be used (for example a keychain, small sd cards, heck, i was able to get a swiss knife) And wouldnt you know it, today i found a sealed box of 10 floppy disks from verbatin It was going to be trash anyways cause it wasnt going to be recycled, so i didnt had any issues bringing it back home Idk what can i do with them tho, they are brand new, havent tested them or anythint, but the box was sealed so, any tips of what can i use them for?

[@mahiru20ten]

I remember playing Mario Teaches Typing and Kid Pix (the third one, not the second like one seen on the video) on a local computer course.

[@Computist40]

Someone I used to work with made a pen holder out of dysfunctional 3 1/2 inch floppy disks.

[@roybixby6135]

I wished I'd known floppies were still in demand - I just threw out 2 tea cheats full of unopened 5.25" and 1 1/2 chests of 3.5" floppies...

[@raimondsmakars6268]

This video reminded me the one that Techmoan made recently when he bought bunch of unknown condition MD players from Japan. I find these kind of videos oddly amusing.

[@BertGrink]

I follow TM too :D

[@magnusharrison2715]

i love watching floppy disk stuff

[@meligarcia]

I know that floppies are fragile but this is beyond what I expected

[@EvT91]

you should try the ones you were excited about just in case they actually work. for example: Mario Teaches Typing

[@SparkyMAWy]

I wonder if they are all 100% dead or if they are media that the supplier didn't want to put time in to? They could be 2SDS fails where the drive writes both sides at the same time at double speed (600rpm vs. 300rpm). Some disks that fail this process work fine in normal drives after a format. My first job was for a disk duplicators. I could count floppy disks in my sleep.

[@jamiecullen9075]

Hey Michael did you upgrade your microphone recently by any chance? Your voiceover sounds better?! ☺️

[@AveragePootis]

Please try these in computers, would be interesting to see if they are actually broken

[@Kali_Krause]

*sees a Kid Pix floppy* I had the CD version of Kid Pix for Windows 95 and 98 SE. I have a very old Logitech floppy and a full back up of Windows 98 SE from my old computer from 1999.

[@KasseBasses]

Why did you not test it with scandisk?

[@JeffCD77]

"Only" $24? In most cases, these end up in people's trash cans. Yea, it's definitely neat to go through them or use them as art if that's your thing, but at almost $25, I'm not so sure that's such a great buy. But hey, if it's worth it to you, and you feel that you get $25 worth of entertainment out of it, than that's all that matters.

[@Mystic4rrow]

Dude can you make a few videos on Mac OS development? If it’s possible.

[@brokenelectronics3665]

Claris was formed as a result of Apple's decision to spin off much of their software, such as MacWrite, MacPaint, and even AppleWorks. It became ClarisWorks, before finally becoming AppleWorks again. HyperCard was part of that package of software.

[@jeninimas]

9:54 “Norton Utilities for Macintosh, this is for Windows 95” what

[@MichaelMJD]

The one I’m holding is for Macintosh, the one in the pile is for Win95

[@TottyRops]

It would be cool if you tried to format them to see if they actually were broken or not.

[@orlandokaraoke3002]

Practice some extreme data recovery and try your hand at repairing them

[@deadendwaterfall]

Hello floppy, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again.

[@michaeltechroom]

i am curious if some of the Broken Floppy Disks still work

[@JTRAIN]

I think that you have tested those 100 Broken Floppy disks

[@stonent]

I was thinking make an AT or ATX computer case out of floppy disks.

[@mrnmrn1]

I would not be confident using refurbished 3.5" floppies. I had *so much* trouble with them, they were super unreliable. I used them regularly until 2004, when I bought my first USB flash drive. I was using them bringing downloaded stuff (mostly datasheets and service manuals) home from the school, because we did not have internet access at home until 2009. I was struggling with these bloody floppies, I was happy if I was able to use one three times before they failed. If something was important, I put multiple copies of it on the same disk, and have a backup disk for it. The main issue was probably dirty drives. When dust falls into these 3,5" floppies, it scratches the surface what makes sectors unreadable. If it affects sector 0, all the disk contents are gone. Most old PC cases had airflow issues, and a lot of air was sucked in through floppy and optical drives' bays and through the drives themselves, therefore dust accumulated in the floppy drives. The PCs in my school's library in 2002-2004 were Pentium 166 to 233MHz machines from around 1994-1996, running Windows NT, hooked up to 50ohm coaxial ring Ethernet. I'm sure their drives were super dirty after all these years of use.

[@DukeOfTrains]

I wonder if you could get the Mario teaches typing to work I know it said broken but tell us what happens when you try to use Mario teaches typing floppys