For everyone saying, "Contact the original owner!" etc, you gotta be careful doing that. I used to buy old PC parts and I've had more than one person accuse me of stalking or extorting them when I contacted them to offer them a USB of their old files. I am dead serious. This happened more than once. One time was extra sad. This old Dell had belonged to this elderly man and he had apparently died and the PC went to his grandson. It was full of pictures of him and his wife, both of them long deceased at this point. I found the Grandson on Facebook and he never responded so I reached out to the son who was some naturopath in Colorado (Circa 2013). The next thing I knew I was being served with a restraining order. I shit you not. I literally just wanted to send him a USB stick with the pictures of his dead parents on it. Always remember that some people are not tech savvy and may be bonkers. IN OTHER NEWS, I'm really surprised those first two drives didn't have any DOOM saves on them. Seeing Napster Beta took me WAY back, holy hells.
News flash... Most people in this word are truly awful. Though they're are so many that their a lots of good people like you. More bad but remember most people are kind of stupid and ignorant.
it kind of makes sense if you think about it, even if it was a nice act i'd still feel sus if someone out of the blue tried to send me pictures of my mom or something
@VEST Studios in 1990s nes was very popular then and mods of nes games was very common even in nes cartridges as well and so in computers there are hundreds of mods available for games so nothing surprising
Every time u find some mistery hard drive do this: 1)Open the HDD in a virtual machine, for security reasons. 2)If the drive has files or folders after 2009 check for bitcoin wallets or text files with private keys, u never know, people lost HDDs with lots off BTCs in the first years. 3)Check for other usable media, maybe u can find some lost movies or TV episodes. 4)Do a slow format of the drive and put it back to work until it dies.
It's crazy how people are literally tossing their personal data into bins that anyone can reach into. Even if these hard drives had been reformatted or had their petitions deleted - neither of course was the case - that still wouldn't have been enough: I always run DBAN on any Hard Disk before I send it away for recycling.
I don't toss out any hard drives until they fail. After they fail, I disassemble them to get the magnets, so any remaining data will be destroyed by this, as soon as I remove the platters. If I don't want to keep the platters, I bend them. Not that anyone would do costly data recovery on a random hard drive that is phisically failed. There were some examples when the drive was still working, but had a lot of bad sectors, well, I used to bend the platters in a 90° angle in those ones. Once i got a surpise from an IBM drive, when I tried to bend the platter, it exploded to a million pieces. Turned out it was glass 🙂 . Last year we were moving out of one of the sites at work, I "wiped" some old (but not vintage) hard drives with the tip of a huge pickaxe... An other surprise was in an ancient 80MB Conner IDE hard drive, the platters were super hard, yet very light, I was completely unable to bend them. I put one of them on a gas stove for 15 minutes, and I was still unable to bend it significantly, even in a vise with a big wrench. I guess it was probably titanium. I think I still have the other platter from that drive somewhere in a paper CD case. It has a very nice golden color. The mechanism was made by Sony.
@@mrnmrn1 okay what's wrong with somebody getting hold of your data most likely it's just going to be thrown away crushed up but there's always a smart small chance that that was from a Microsoft employee and we might find an unused unfound beta version of Windows like a new Longhorn build then you would be praised by the archive community and archive team
I don't think the NES emulator is "crashing" per se. You probably need to run it with a ROM file. Like drag a ROM file onto the EXE and then it'll probably work. Or run it in a command line with a ROM file as a parameter.
TNES was the very first emulator I ever used, back before NESticle and others came along, and you're exactly right. I was hoping he'd figure it out so I could see it running for the first time in years.
TNES in the emulation folder likely required you to drag and drop a .nes file into it or otherwise feed it a command line param as many old DOS programs typically needed.
Seagate didn't start using plain date codes until many years later. That one you had there was a 730MB (Listed as 722MB) ST3780A which had a pretty narrow manufacture window, it was very likely made some time in 1994
For sure HD models were manufactured for shorter spans of time back then because things were moving (and going obsolete) SO much faster back then. Which I honestly do not miss.
I used to have a job where one of my tasks was destroying the company’s old hard drives as a security measure. This video made me realize just how important that was.
The reason why the Zelda soundtrack seems not so '' authentic '' is because the version you tried here is from 1986, therefore it's the version released on the FDS (Famicom Disk System). The '' original '' US NES version was released in 1987, but the FDS had a way better hardware, RAM expansion (that you used in the cartridge slot) and a proprietary floppy drive, allowing for better soundtracks with more audio tracks, a few more levels, etc. that the NES version didn't due to its limited hardware compared to the FDS. Also, Zelda 1 was the first ever game ported on the NES to include a battery for save files, being a port of the FDS version that used the floppy for storing save files. Just a little piece of info that could help, as I used to have a NES and a FDS (SMB2: Lost Levels was only released on the FDS at first, and I wanted to play it. So I found a FDS.)
Michael, if you haven't already wiped the first two drives at least try to find the guy who owned them. It shouldn't be too hard given you have a thesis written by them. I think there's a good chance they would like to have their old data back!
@@Spamton In that case all data could be recovered, i.e. using cgsecurity's Testdisk tool. You'd need to write as much data to a drive as it can fit to entirely overwrite it, which takes some time.
It's very hard to boot windows on a computer that it was not installed on. But, if you open the registry hive with an external reg editor, you can make some modifications to trigger an OOBE that will make the system work on your computer without removing any data
When I transfered the windows 8.1 drive from my old hp laptop into my old asus laptop (that used to run windows 10), windows booted with 0 issues. That said, the trackpad and network of course weren't working, as there were no drivers for the hardware.
They're likely broken or dying and slowing down. Edit: so far I'm supprised to see that most seem to work and have data. If you ever find any and Windows thinks it's blank and/or corrupted try hooking it imto a Linux system, it may just be a file system Windows dosn't reconize.
Having dealt with drives like that, Windows usually says you need to format the drive before you can use it. If you go into Disk Management, it will give the correct drive capacity but it will say its file system is unknown so you can't do anything with it but format it
My drive started slowly emptying out folders and deleting text files before it died. It was tragic like the computer equivalent of watching your friend succumb to dementia
@@Journey_to_who_knows I would say what actually happened was the pointers for those files and folders were being deleted or corrupted. If you still have the drive and haven't formatted it or overwritten it, there's a very good chance the data will be entirely recoverable
A good number of the HDDs I used to buy had personal data on them, the overwhelming majority had a recoverable partition. Best one was a 64gb Micro SD card I found inside a used Acer 2in1 which was previously owned by a guy whose company had a contract installing networks in Police stations and who also did talks about online security. I know this because he left all of this information on the unformatted SD card including network maps of named Police stations, Powerpoint presentations of his talks and payroll data for all his employees.
This kind of video is why when my family is getting rid of old computers they would smash the hard drives with a hammer and left them outside in the rain.
Hi Michael! The Seagate ST3780A was released to the market in 1994. Combining with its capacity 722MB (it was quite large) it can give you some approx. time of production between 1994 and 1995. Starting 1996 - 1GB and more became more popular (and cheaper) so it's less posibble that this drive could be 1996+.
For everyone saying "Find the owner and give them back" there is a chance that they threw them away recently, after cleaning, so they are sure they don't want them. I dont see how someone threw away a hard drive in 2000 and it still being in an e waste facility
The Sierra TIM2 game @14:42 requires EMS memory. It clearly states in the message. It is hard to configure EMS in win ME, better revert to Win98 SE (it is better system for retro anyway) or boot directly to DOS. Having proper setup for EMS and XMS memory was a part of the skill of a proficient DOS gamer back in the day.
@@NintendoDude888 course they are...they practically set themselves up...run at 60fps...outside of some minor tweeking of shadows etc, games look as good as they need to be. Memory, cpu speed, everything...all make little difference to much. Gone are the days of squeezing another 10 mhz out of your 486 to get quake to run just a few frames faster....
@@NintendoDude888 of course the games look absolutely amazing these days vs the quake days and imagine trying to run a occulus rift on a 486.....price of progress I guess.
@DccToon Who really cares? Readers of my comment will know what I meant. Maybe you should learn how to use punctuation like capital letters and full stops properly before you lecture others on the use of english!
You can boot off those HDDs if you run a tool called Fix HDC. It resets the windows' hard drive controller to a generic one. Hiren's boot CD 15.2 has this tool.
Bow to the fecal lord! Man seeing that disorganized emulation directory really takes me back. Good old days of downloading roms over a modem at the library and carting them back home on floppies.
That HP Games folder is bringing back memories. I remember we had a Compaq computer with Windows 7 on it and I spent the day playing Bejeweled and Blasterball 3 :3
While dropping off metal at the local recycling center, I noticed an HP sff pc in the pile (there's a separate computer pile so this was in the wrong place) and put it in the back of the truck. Got home and there was a 256GB Micron SSD and two 10TB WD Purple HDDs in the drive bays (SSD hanging loose and the HDDs in the two drive bays). On a scan they had 19k hours and only 26 startups and were pretty quiet still. Only problem was I had to use Linux to clear the drives (Windows had no control) and one of the Purples is missing the plastic piece for the SATA data side (the contacts are still there so it works fine).
Oh my, the HP Games/Wild Tangent games bring back so many memories of playing those games on my dad's HP. We never paid for the service though so I never got past the trials. My favorite was Penguins!
ahhhh old hard drives from abandonned computers, people often forgot to erase those but by doing so they often leave behind memories, i remember saving a compaq desktop EN from the trash the thing was full of family photos and videos, a veritable time capsule :)
well if you ask me... he is a plumber afterall uk... like it makes more sense lmao and funfact: if you still have the original copy of Bejeweled 2 on CD from bigfish games you can still in 2022 can install it on a old vista/7/XP pc from the CD, go to the internet sign in to your big fish games account that you purchased the CD and activate the game. mad respect to these game publishers man like even modern game store platforms dont promise you that kind of support after being dead for over 15 years.
That 3rd drive is a real nostalgia trip. Lots of WildTangent and Reflexive Arcade games, something I play a lot. Jewel Quest, Ricochet, Polar Sports + Penguins! (I have a CD of that), just awesome!
the 1st drive was a nostalgia trip for me even tho I wasn't even alive when those games that he was playing came out Idk it's like nostalgia for a thing you've never experienced
That first Seagate hard drive was likely manufactured sometime in the early 90s. I googled the model name and got a product guide dated '94, so it was likely made then or later. Hope it helps
Since no one appears to have pointed this out, I thought I might as well: It might not be a good idea to censor text by blurring, as it can often be recovered if the font is known by incrementally matching a reconstruction to the blur pattern. For photos it should be fine though. edit: actually, none of these are screen capture footage, so this probably isn't relevant after all.
this is why i collect hard drives just for some reason lol, i use them on my old dell like yours on the background, but it kind of broke when i connected a bad hard drive 💀
@@shitpostinggang wait, did it short out part of the board, or did you bend a pin? if you bent a pin on the board, then it must have been the ide cable not the drive
@@curvingfyre6810 i put it in. and i think the HDD was infected?? because after wards it caused a short cut, and making the laptop not work with any hdd anymore, so now i am waiting to see if theres any way to fjx it
it's amazing what kind of things you can find at e-waste facilities / thrift stores / etc etc. So much fun just looking to see what gems are tossed aside like this.
I was at an actual dump last year, and found a hdd laying on top of a pile of electronics in a dumpster that was within arm distance. I picked it up, and it was only 5 years old, mfg'd 2015 1tb usb 3.5" slim drive and looked to be in good condition. I wasn't going to pick it up, but my dad poked at it and I decided to take it home. It worked and it only had some movies on it. I ended up reformatting the entire drive just in case.
This was a really neat idea for a video, and so well executed. In response to what kind of content we (audience) prefer, personally while I can very happily sit back and appreciate a 30-60 minute documentary-esque video going into thorough detail about a given game/computer or company, there is something comforting about loose unscripted videos like this. (In this case) exploring the HDDs with you, not knowing what to expect gives a warm and friendly vibe to the video. I feel the same about random long videos playing obscure games, PC teardown and rebuilds/restorations, parts testing ect.
Huh. That folder where Toilet Mario was in has a program called Tile Layer, that's an old graphic editor for roms which I've used on my own stuff. So I'm wondering... was this guy a romhacker?
Seeing the NES emulator on the first hard drive is great I would have been wrapt to get it and run through all the old Nintendo games it’s a great find.
imagine just throwing out hard drives without even formatting them. i never thew out a harddrive. in fact i still have hundreds of megabytes that came original from my first hard drive from my pc that i bought in 1994. they're still here with me :D
I would always do a virus scan on any of these types of drives as the very first thing I did. Glad you could re-purpose the drives that worked and saved them from e-waste.
21:37 idk if anyone pointed this out but due to Windows Plug and Play, windows will not boot properly unless the hardrive is in the very specific motherboard windows was installed on (exact COPY of the motherboard) This isn't the result that'll come out of it. When I tried it, it booted normally but no drivers worked
I wonder what kind of awesome stuff was on that drive that warranted someone feeling the need to drill two holes in it. One would have been perfectly adequate, but then they went ahead and did it again just to make sure.
Adobe Photoshop was good but after they moved to the online only cloud based subscription versions I stopped using it. CS6 was the last offline non subscription version they released.
I used to work at a place that had stacks of old hard drives. Well I was broke in those days... So I absolutely took lots and formatted them and hoped for the best!
And for the first hard drive, i'd say it was made in 1994 or 1995, as a manual i found online was dated june 1994. SO that's how old it would've been, as a bit of extra information.
I've bought random drives out of auction (the drives wasn't form owner, he was only collector, probably had many stuff saved from e-waste too, or pulled out of working computers, that went to e-waste) and on one, I even booted up on my testing board into system, there was windows xp, it was probably drive used by some girls according photos. everything without password, just booted fine. the background was big photo with friends. So interesting feeling to boot into someone other's system, like even windows xp survived, and I can use it how it is. The drive was from year 2004 (WD 1600), but files was from 2009-2013. After 2013, they've probably switched to better computer lol. It was probably quite slow computer, when WD1600 was used there. Would like to know, what was path of that drive, but I suspect, as it was quite high-end drive for year 2004, it was firstly bought very expensively in late 2004, or early 2005, into some system, maybe workshop computer, maybe to some enthusiast computer, and then later, it was taken out of the job, or father gave it with already old computer to their daughters, as "children PC".:) After 2013, it was probably so small, it was unusable even as girls computer.
Great video. more of this pls! small tip: to read osx/linux/etc drives on recent windows, 7zip is the answer. if you open 7zip as admin, you can open drives in raw format, after that all partitions are like img, fat efi or even ext4 or mac os related -very big- files but even then, on windows, 7zip can manage to open it like as it's some kind of a zip file. even formatted drives,deleted partitions and even deleted files can be find. don't know of this is a hidden gem. but to me it seems something interesting
The Seagate's manufacturing date should be written in white ink on the PCB it's a 4 digit number indicating the week and year of manufacture. I wish you included the sounds of that drive spinning up and passing its seektest c:
Hi it's me UC8 TV here, that drive is a 722 MB Seagate ST3780A hard drive and it sounds similar to your Seagate Medalist ST31270A . I know this because there is a 10 year old video on RUclips of an identical model hard drive with the click of death.
That HP drive is nostalgic as heck for me. My dad had an HP Vista laptop and I later had an HP windows 7 laptop. I remember many of that stuff. I loved playing Final Drive Nitro and 18 wheels of steel until the trials ran out.
Speaking of Hard drives, I used only hard drives from May 2008 until September 2021. 1) Sony Vaio VGN-FZ35M = Toshiba 200GB HDD 5400RPM (2008 - 2011) 2) Sony Vaio E-Series = Hitachi 320GB HDD 5400RPM (2011 - 2016) 3) Didn't use a laptop from 2016 till 2019 due to the E-Series laptop's motherboard died. 4) Dell Inspiron 5559 (Current laptop) = Used to have a Seagate 500GB HDD 5400RPM, Hard drive died in 2020 for random reason, Used an iPad till September 2021, I put in a 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD which I am using now. OMG All HDDs I used 5400RPM only. Weird. Isn't it?
New update! I am using another laptop because the Dell laptop's SATA connector damaged, along with the charging port. So I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad T540 now. With the 1TB SSD.
Ugh.. People go crazy with that drill decommissioning. One drive I acquired in a lot of other crap was an ST-225 with an asset sticker from some telecom that someone had not only drilled the platters of, but in several places on the PCB as well. Bloody animals...
I hope that people are still modding stuff for personal use like toilet mario, but with modern titles. I'd love to reach my retirement, and see the next generations MichaelMJD picking up some old harddrives with some relics like super skibidi ultimate or something to that effect
Two of my dead HDD's are working perfectly as the base of a home made lamp. Holding the brass lamp socket, is an empty Tylenol bottle which is mounted to the top HDD which is strapped to the bottom HDD.
I still mess with lightscribe. The blanks are expensive, but. The bummer is that you have to install on a computer running 7 or 8. Then upgrade to 10 after you install it.
I got a PC from an auction, and it was full of scans of peoples passports and utility bills along with tax records and banking stuff. Lucky I'm not a scumbag,
remind me to drill a hole in my hard drives before I toss them out, or some RUclipsr will reveal my embarrassing freshman Visual Basic programs and hacked NES ROMS to the world :D
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
For everyone saying, "Contact the original owner!" etc, you gotta be careful doing that. I used to buy old PC parts and I've had more than one person accuse me of stalking or extorting them when I contacted them to offer them a USB of their old files. I am dead serious. This happened more than once. One time was extra sad. This old Dell had belonged to this elderly man and he had apparently died and the PC went to his grandson. It was full of pictures of him and his wife, both of them long deceased at this point. I found the Grandson on Facebook and he never responded so I reached out to the son who was some naturopath in Colorado (Circa 2013). The next thing I knew I was being served with a restraining order. I shit you not. I literally just wanted to send him a USB stick with the pictures of his dead parents on it. Always remember that some people are not tech savvy and may be bonkers.
IN OTHER NEWS, I'm really surprised those first two drives didn't have any DOOM saves on them. Seeing Napster Beta took me WAY back, holy hells.
People never cease to amaze me, in a bad way :(
News flash... Most people in this word are truly awful.
Though they're are so many that their a lots of good people like you. More bad but remember most people are kind of stupid and ignorant.
it kind of makes sense if you think about it, even if it was a nice act i'd still feel sus if someone out of the blue tried to send me pictures of my mom or something
@@Plentyof That's kind of a you problem tbh, like i'd feel the same way but i have an anxiety disorder, so
@@ChakkyCharizardwith that reply you have more than just a anxiety disorder, or you are very young.
Toilet Mario is like the 90s version of "Super Sized Mario Bros", it's so bizarre that was found in someone's hard drive.
@VEST Corporations lol, mario on a toil-laughing-et, I can't! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
oh hi
@VEST Studios in 1990s nes was very popular then and mods of nes games was very common even in nes cartridges as well and so in computers there are hundreds of mods available for games so nothing surprising
earliest recording of skibidi toilet (i'm sorry i couldn't resist the urge)
skibidi toilet
Every time u find some mistery hard drive do this:
1)Open the HDD in a virtual machine, for security reasons.
2)If the drive has files or folders after 2009 check for bitcoin wallets or text files with private keys, u never know, people lost HDDs with lots off BTCs in the first years.
3)Check for other usable media, maybe u can find some lost movies or TV episodes.
4)Do a slow format of the drive and put it back to work until it dies.
I want to play "Toilet Mario" when available.
Lol
bruh lol
😂😂😂
Lmao 🤣
Hope MJD backs that up before wiping the hard drive.
It's crazy how people are literally tossing their personal data into bins that anyone can reach into. Even if these hard drives had been reformatted or had their petitions deleted - neither of course was the case - that still wouldn't have been enough: I always run DBAN on any Hard Disk before I send it away for recycling.
I don't toss out any hard drives until they fail. After they fail, I disassemble them to get the magnets, so any remaining data will be destroyed by this, as soon as I remove the platters. If I don't want to keep the platters, I bend them. Not that anyone would do costly data recovery on a random hard drive that is phisically failed. There were some examples when the drive was still working, but had a lot of bad sectors, well, I used to bend the platters in a 90° angle in those ones. Once i got a surpise from an IBM drive, when I tried to bend the platter, it exploded to a million pieces. Turned out it was glass 🙂 . Last year we were moving out of one of the sites at work, I "wiped" some old (but not vintage) hard drives with the tip of a huge pickaxe...
An other surprise was in an ancient 80MB Conner IDE hard drive, the platters were super hard, yet very light, I was completely unable to bend them. I put one of them on a gas stove for 15 minutes, and I was still unable to bend it significantly, even in a vise with a big wrench. I guess it was probably titanium. I think I still have the other platter from that drive somewhere in a paper CD case. It has a very nice golden color. The mechanism was made by Sony.
@@mrnmrn1 okay what's wrong with somebody getting hold of your data most likely it's just going to be thrown away crushed up but there's always a smart small chance that that was from a Microsoft employee and we might find an unused unfound beta version of Windows like a new Longhorn build then you would be praised by the archive community and archive team
@@mrnmrn1 exactly my process
@@mrnmrn1 the platters, make they good up market drink coasters, with storage hole in the middle too! 🙂
I think the answer to the original comment is that we’re normal and don’t think about these things so deeply.
I don't think the NES emulator is "crashing" per se. You probably need to run it with a ROM file. Like drag a ROM file onto the EXE and then it'll probably work. Or run it in a command line with a ROM file as a parameter.
TNES was the very first emulator I ever used, back before NESticle and others came along, and you're exactly right. I was hoping he'd figure it out so I could see it running for the first time in years.
TNES in the emulation folder likely required you to drag and drop a .nes file into it or otherwise feed it a command line param as many old DOS programs typically needed.
It had multiple shortcuts. It was definitely for command line for starting a specific
Tried this out and that is the case!
Yeah I was thinking it probably needed to be run by command line or something to that effect
@@Kyle1444 yea i would've clicked one of those shortcuts
Ho yea, Iremeber now
Its so interesting to see Michael get random stuff from yard sales etc and just check them
Seagate didn't start using plain date codes until many years later. That one you had there was a 730MB (Listed as 722MB) ST3780A which had a pretty narrow manufacture window, it was very likely made some time in 1994
For sure HD models were manufactured for shorter spans of time back then because things were moving (and going obsolete) SO much faster back then. Which I honestly do not miss.
Its manual dates exactly back to 1994 :)
I used to have a job where one of my tasks was destroying the company’s old hard drives as a security measure. This video made me realize just how important that was.
The reason why the Zelda soundtrack seems not so '' authentic '' is because the version you tried here is from 1986, therefore it's the version released on the FDS (Famicom Disk System). The '' original '' US NES version was released in 1987, but the FDS had a way better hardware, RAM expansion (that you used in the cartridge slot) and a proprietary floppy drive, allowing for better soundtracks with more audio tracks, a few more levels, etc. that the NES version didn't due to its limited hardware compared to the FDS. Also, Zelda 1 was the first ever game ported on the NES to include a battery for save files, being a port of the FDS version that used the floppy for storing save files.
Just a little piece of info that could help, as I used to have a NES and a FDS (SMB2: Lost Levels was only released on the FDS at first, and I wanted to play it. So I found a FDS.)
It was so much fun being able to play console games on those early DOS emulators like Nesticle, ZSNES, Genecyst, etc.
Awesome video. Its so crazy that you may find lost media on drives like these.
It's like finding lost media on VHS but with software
Michael, if you haven't already wiped the first two drives at least try to find the guy who owned them. It shouldn't be too hard given you have a thesis written by them. I think there's a good chance they would like to have their old data back!
Sadly he probably already wiped them.
I want this to happen too!
@@Spamton In that case all data could be recovered, i.e. using cgsecurity's Testdisk tool.
You'd need to write as much data to a drive as it can fit to entirely overwrite it, which takes some time.
The wild assumption being because the previous owner didn't wipe the drive, they couldn't possibly have backed up the data themselves??? 😮
Why the fuck would he want them back? Dude probably threw them in the bin to get rid of them.
It's very hard to boot windows on a computer that it was not installed on. But, if you open the registry hive with an external reg editor, you can make some modifications to trigger an OOBE that will make the system work on your computer without removing any data
That, or boot in safe mode and uninstall the drivers then install the correct ones. Specially chipset and GPU.
When I transfered the windows 8.1 drive from my old hp laptop into my old asus laptop (that used to run windows 10), windows booted with 0 issues.
That said, the trackpad and network of course weren't working, as there were no drivers for the hardware.
They're likely broken or dying and slowing down.
Edit: so far I'm supprised to see that most seem to work and have data. If you ever find any and Windows thinks it's blank and/or corrupted try hooking it imto a Linux system, it may just be a file system Windows dosn't reconize.
Having dealt with drives like that, Windows usually says you need to format the drive before you can use it. If you go into Disk Management, it will give the correct drive capacity but it will say its file system is unknown so you can't do anything with it but format it
@@thomasvlaskampiii6850 good to know, I have yet to hook up a drive that wasn't FAT32 or NTFS to a Windows system.
My drive started slowly emptying out folders and deleting text files before it died. It was tragic like the computer equivalent of watching your friend
succumb to dementia
@@Journey_to_who_knows I would say what actually happened was the pointers for those files and folders were being deleted or corrupted. If you still have the drive and haven't formatted it or overwritten it, there's a very good chance the data will be entirely recoverable
A good number of the HDDs I used to buy had personal data on them, the overwhelming majority had a recoverable partition.
Best one was a 64gb Micro SD card I found inside a used Acer 2in1 which was previously owned by a guy whose company had a contract installing networks in Police stations and who also did talks about online security. I know this because he left all of this information on the unformatted SD card including network maps of named Police stations, Powerpoint presentations of his talks and payroll data for all his employees.
Jesus christ
16:42 Should have done a divide by 0 test right there
Yep
Probably it will just crash
This kind of video is why when my family is getting rid of old computers they would smash the hard drives with a hammer and left them outside in the rain.
i guess they just didn't know what formatting was
Hi Michael! The Seagate ST3780A was released to the market in 1994. Combining with its capacity 722MB (it was quite large) it can give you some approx. time of production between 1994 and 1995. Starting 1996 - 1GB and more became more popular (and cheaper) so it's less posibble that this drive could be 1996+.
I love these types of videos. Thank you, Michael!
Yeah these are best
For everyone saying "Find the owner and give them back" there is a chance that they threw them away recently, after cleaning, so they are sure they don't want them. I dont see how someone threw away a hard drive in 2000 and it still being in an e waste facility
The Sierra TIM2 game @14:42 requires EMS memory. It clearly states in the message. It is hard to configure EMS in win ME, better revert to Win98 SE (it is better system for retro anyway) or boot directly to DOS. Having proper setup for EMS and XMS memory was a part of the skill of a proficient DOS gamer back in the day.
ahh seeing these "legacy" drives reminds me a lot of those days where I was still passionate about geeky computer stuff
Yeah...now pcs are sterile and pointless tweeking.
@@NintendoDude888 course they are...they practically set themselves up...run at 60fps...outside of some minor tweeking of shadows etc, games look as good as they need to be. Memory, cpu speed, everything...all make little difference to much. Gone are the days of squeezing another 10 mhz out of your 486 to get quake to run just a few frames faster....
@@NintendoDude888 of course the games look absolutely amazing these days vs the quake days and imagine trying to run a occulus rift on a 486.....price of progress I guess.
@@lepterfirefall T W E A K I N G
I LITERALLY LEARNED ENGLISH FROM ARABIC AND THIS IS THE SIMPLEST GRAMMAR MISTAKE EVER
@DccToon Who really cares? Readers of my comment will know what I meant. Maybe you should learn how to use punctuation like capital letters and full stops properly before you lecture others on the use of english!
The First hard drive guy is some kind of emulation fanatic lmao
You can boot off those HDDs if you run a tool called Fix HDC. It resets the windows' hard drive controller to a generic one.
Hiren's boot CD 15.2 has this tool.
Bow to the fecal lord!
Man seeing that disorganized emulation directory really takes me back. Good old days of downloading roms over a modem at the library and carting them back home on floppies.
That HP Games folder is bringing back memories. I remember we had a Compaq computer with Windows 7 on it and I spent the day playing Bejeweled and Blasterball 3 :3
While dropping off metal at the local recycling center, I noticed an HP sff pc in the pile (there's a separate computer pile so this was in the wrong place) and put it in the back of the truck. Got home and there was a 256GB Micron SSD and two 10TB WD Purple HDDs in the drive bays (SSD hanging loose and the HDDs in the two drive bays). On a scan they had 19k hours and only 26 startups and were pretty quiet still.
Only problem was I had to use Linux to clear the drives (Windows had no control) and one of the Purples is missing the plastic piece for the SATA data side (the contacts are still there so it works fine).
Quite a pot of gold find, I can’t believe the stuff people throw out
19k hours and 26 startups? Smells like server.
Oh my, the HP Games/Wild Tangent games bring back so many memories of playing those games on my dad's HP. We never paid for the service though so I never got past the trials. My favorite was Penguins!
Me neither, we also never paid through the trials.
Mine was Torchlight 1
Dude's running emulators and coding stuff, but doesn't delete personal data
Imagine the persons who threw those HDDs away see this video.
ahhhh old hard drives from abandonned computers, people often forgot to erase those but by doing so they often leave behind memories, i remember saving a compaq desktop EN from the trash
the thing was full of family photos and videos, a veritable time capsule :)
That disc with holes drilled into it probably has some state secrets on it lol xD
Nice to see old hard drives in action & still running well!
well if you ask me... he is a plumber afterall uk... like it makes more sense lmao
and funfact: if you still have the original copy of Bejeweled 2 on CD from bigfish games you can still in 2022 can install it on a old vista/7/XP pc from the CD, go to the internet sign in to your big fish games account that you purchased the CD and activate the game. mad respect to these game publishers man like even modern game store platforms dont promise you that kind of support after being dead for over 15 years.
Toilet Mario makes total sense. He was a plumber!
That 3rd drive is a real nostalgia trip. Lots of WildTangent and Reflexive Arcade games, something I play a lot. Jewel Quest, Ricochet, Polar Sports + Penguins! (I have a CD of that), just awesome!
Oh god, I installed WildTangent on my old Compaq laptop just for nostalgia (especially Penguins!, I love the damn lemmings clone)
the 1st drive was a nostalgia trip for me even tho I wasn't even alive when those games that he was playing came out
Idk it's like nostalgia for a thing you've never experienced
One of these days I'm going to buy a spare drive, put a bunch of weird shit on it and just leave it somewhere
That first Seagate hard drive was likely manufactured sometime in the early 90s. I googled the model name and got a product guide dated '94, so it was likely made then or later. Hope it helps
Since no one appears to have pointed this out, I thought I might as well:
It might not be a good idea to censor text by blurring, as it can often be recovered if the font is known by incrementally matching a reconstruction to the blur pattern. For photos it should be fine though.
edit: actually, none of these are screen capture footage, so this probably isn't relevant after all.
this is why i collect hard drives just for some reason lol, i use them on my old dell like yours on the background, but it kind of broke when i connected a bad hard drive 💀
oof, potential malicious software? try swapping the drives with a fresh windows install
@@curvingfyre6810 no i mean like broke the hdd plug 💀
@@shitpostinggang Oof
@@shitpostinggang wait, did it short out part of the board, or did you bend a pin? if you bent a pin on the board, then it must have been the ide cable not the drive
@@curvingfyre6810 i put it in. and i think the HDD was infected?? because after wards it caused a short cut, and making the laptop not work with any hdd anymore, so now i am waiting to see if theres any way to fjx it
it's amazing what kind of things you can find at e-waste facilities / thrift stores / etc etc. So much fun just looking to see what gems are tossed aside like this.
Quite surprised you had not heard of The incredible machine series. Absolutely classic!
I was at an actual dump last year, and found a hdd laying on top of a pile of electronics in a dumpster that was within arm distance. I picked it up, and it was only 5 years old, mfg'd 2015 1tb usb 3.5" slim drive and looked to be in good condition. I wasn't going to pick it up, but my dad poked at it and I decided to take it home. It worked and it only had some movies on it. I ended up reformatting the entire drive just in case.
This was a really neat idea for a video, and so well executed. In response to what kind of content we (audience) prefer, personally while I can very happily sit back and appreciate a 30-60 minute documentary-esque video going into thorough detail about a given game/computer or company, there is something comforting about loose unscripted videos like this.
(In this case) exploring the HDDs with you, not knowing what to expect gives a warm and friendly vibe to the video. I feel the same about random long videos playing obscure games, PC teardown and rebuilds/restorations, parts testing ect.
Huh. That folder where Toilet Mario was in has a program called Tile Layer, that's an old graphic editor for roms which I've used on my own stuff. So I'm wondering... was this guy a romhacker?
Toilet Mario is clearly the prequel to Paper Mario. Duh.
You should do a video on running an anti-virus scan on those two IDE hard drives and see how many viruses are on those drives.
@IDoStuffs probably
Wow, Nesticle. That takes me back. That was the first emulator I ever used.
Seeing the NES emulator on the first hard drive is great I would have been wrapt to get it and run through all the old Nintendo games it’s a great find.
TIM2 in the Sierra folder at 14:42 is The Incredible Machine 2 - man I remember playing that way back when!
This my first time knowing that there is something called yard sales
Keep up the great content ❤❤❤
me screaming at the screen "ITS NOT HOT-SWAPPABLE" lmao glad you figured it out 😅
imagine just throwing out hard drives without even formatting them. i never thew out a harddrive. in fact i still have hundreds of megabytes that came original from my first hard drive from my pc that i bought in 1994. they're still here with me :D
I would always do a virus scan on any of these types of drives as the very first thing I did. Glad you could re-purpose the drives that worked and saved them from e-waste.
I get these all the time - but from the 90s. ANY Quantum that works from that era is simply a miracle.
21:37 idk if anyone pointed this out but due to Windows Plug and Play, windows will not boot properly unless the hardrive is in the very specific motherboard windows was installed on (exact COPY of the motherboard)
This isn't the result that'll come out of it. When I tried it, it booted normally but no drivers worked
inb4 toilet mario is the holy grail of rom hacks and a copy hasn't been seen since the 90s.
I wonder what kind of awesome stuff was on that drive that warranted someone feeling the need to drill two holes in it. One would have been perfectly adequate, but then they went ahead and did it again just to make sure.
well, it's still not impossible to recover some data from them.
Wait, I couldn't even find any video about this "Toilet Mario" hack. Maybe this needs to be preserved XD
For anyone who’s interested, the exact same Toilet Mario ROM hack is archived on a website called NES Ninja.
Adobe Photoshop was good but after they moved to the online only cloud based subscription versions I stopped using it. CS6 was the last offline non subscription version they released.
Have been very satisfied with my version of CS6 :) which I moved onto from CS1 (but used CS3 elsewhere too)
I got a little sentimental at the end
Thank you michael
That HP Games folder brings back so many memories.
Maybe a good video idea?
Folder looks pretty dang close to what I downloaded back in the day.
The first drive is listed as 722MB on the label.
The capacity is printed on the Seagate in the bottom right hand corner and is supposed to have a capacity of 722 MB
I like how the Mac has an iPhone 6s ipsw for iOS 9.3.2 on the desktop for no reason.
Hitachi drives where e-waste even back when they were sold.
Hitachi Deathstar :D
I do enjoy when MJD gets things aligned for anyone viewing that has OCD (I don't, but it's still satisfying)
didn't expect to have NESticle flashbacks today, but here we are
I used to work at a place that had stacks of old hard drives. Well I was broke in those days... So I absolutely took lots and formatted them and hoped for the best!
And for the first hard drive, i'd say it was made in 1994 or 1995, as a manual i found online was dated june 1994. SO that's how old it would've been, as a bit of extra information.
Wish those first two drives were bootable, I'm sure we'd have seen some crazy theme or custom desktop.
The capacity of the Seagate ST3780A is stated right there on the label, above the warning, 722MB.
I've bought random drives out of auction (the drives wasn't form owner, he was only collector, probably had many stuff saved from e-waste too, or pulled out of working computers, that went to e-waste)
and on one, I even booted up on my testing board into system, there was windows xp, it was probably drive used by some girls according photos. everything without password, just booted fine. the background was big photo with friends. So interesting feeling to boot into someone other's system, like even windows xp survived, and I can use it how it is. The drive was from year 2004 (WD 1600), but files was from 2009-2013. After 2013, they've probably switched to better computer lol. It was probably quite slow computer, when WD1600 was used there.
Would like to know, what was path of that drive, but I suspect, as it was quite high-end drive for year 2004, it was firstly bought very expensively in late 2004, or early 2005, into some system, maybe workshop computer, maybe to some enthusiast computer, and then later, it was taken out of the job, or father gave it with already old computer to their daughters, as "children PC".:) After 2013, it was probably so small, it was unusable even as girls computer.
lol this dude tried to give his teacher a virus with his homework
Great video. more of this pls!
small tip: to read osx/linux/etc drives on recent windows, 7zip is the answer.
if you open 7zip as admin, you can open drives in raw format, after that all partitions are like img, fat efi or even ext4 or mac os related -very big- files but even then, on windows, 7zip can manage to open it like as it's some kind of a zip file.
even formatted drives,deleted partitions and even deleted files can be find.
don't know of this is a hidden gem. but to me it seems something interesting
The Seagate's manufacturing date should be written in white ink on the PCB it's a 4 digit number indicating the week and year of manufacture.
I wish you included the sounds of that drive spinning up and passing its seektest c:
Hi it's me UC8 TV here, that drive is a 722 MB Seagate ST3780A hard drive and it sounds similar to your Seagate Medalist ST31270A . I know this because there is a 10 year old video on RUclips of an identical model hard drive with the click of death.
I googled the model name and found a product manual dated 1994. At the very least it was manufactured sometime in the 90s.
That HP drive is nostalgic as heck for me. My dad had an HP Vista laptop and I later had an HP windows 7 laptop. I remember many of that stuff. I loved playing Final Drive Nitro and 18 wheels of steel until the trials ran out.
Speaking of Hard drives, I used only hard drives from May 2008 until September 2021.
1) Sony Vaio VGN-FZ35M = Toshiba 200GB HDD 5400RPM (2008 - 2011)
2) Sony Vaio E-Series = Hitachi 320GB HDD 5400RPM (2011 - 2016)
3) Didn't use a laptop from 2016 till 2019 due to the E-Series laptop's motherboard died.
4) Dell Inspiron 5559 (Current laptop) = Used to have a Seagate 500GB HDD 5400RPM, Hard drive died in 2020 for random reason, Used an iPad till September 2021, I put in a 1TB WD Blue SATA SSD which I am using now.
OMG All HDDs I used 5400RPM only. Weird. Isn't it?
New update! I am using another laptop because the Dell laptop's SATA connector damaged, along with the charging port. So I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad T540 now. With the 1TB SSD.
I think that's Nesticle, a great NES emulator back in the day.
I always buy the digital cameras in thrift stores if they have memory cards just because I love snooping. As usual I see some funny things
Toilet Mario 😂
Awesome Video Brother!
While you saying "The capacity isn't event printed..." i was reading the 722.0 MB part on the label 😅
Ugh.. People go crazy with that drill decommissioning. One drive I acquired in a lot of other crap was an ST-225 with an asset sticker from some telecom that someone had not only drilled the platters of, but in several places on the PCB as well. Bloody animals...
Toilet Mario doesn't seems all that farfetched an idea when you consider that he's already a plumber.
running something called "toilet mario" was a very brave move
thank you michael, always enjoying your content!
The archives call for Toilet Mario, Michael.
TIM2, create a Rube Goldberg style machine from pre-made items, like bowling balls, hampster cages, etc.
a.k.a The Incredible Machine
A computer from randomly collected broken parts that makes “kill me” notifications
I hope that people are still modding stuff for personal use like toilet mario, but with modern titles. I'd love to reach my retirement, and see the next generations MichaelMJD picking up some old harddrives with some relics like super skibidi ultimate or something to that effect
The reason Marios name is changed to John is because John is another name for a toilet "Sitting on the John".
It is good to rescue old working hard drives. There are 4GB hard drives on Ebay and Amazon.
Two of my dead HDD's are working perfectly as the base of a home made lamp. Holding the brass lamp socket, is an empty Tylenol bottle which is mounted to the top HDD which is strapped to the bottom HDD.
I still mess with lightscribe. The blanks are expensive, but. The bummer is that you have to install on a computer running 7 or 8. Then upgrade to 10 after you install it.
what r u talkin about I love the video!!! you put love and care with every second of it and it shows!! to the best man!
I got a PC from an auction, and it was full of scans of peoples passports and utility bills along with tax records and banking stuff. Lucky I'm not a scumbag,
Time capsules. So cool to see 1995 programs and docs,
remind me to drill a hole in my hard drives before I toss them out, or some RUclipsr will reveal my embarrassing freshman Visual Basic programs and hacked NES ROMS to the world :D