Yes the Chuck E. Cheese Floppies are designed to run the animatronics and lights and from what I can tell they are still using them for their older systems... some of the older systems still run windows 98 apparently. By the way sometimes you can save a disk if you format them... The stack that you had read the directory might be salvageable
24:58 Yep! We're laughing now, but there's a lot of companies using old machines and have no choice but to use floppy disks. I'm a chemical engineering, and I've seen laboratories doing work with floppies when analyzing patients' samples because no manager wants to be the one who spends money on a new machine or instrument during their term, it's a game of hot potato. The floppies at those companies are treated like gold, and someone was actually fired because they flicked the back of it or maybe touched the sensitive part of it too much, deleting the data, and the company actually tracked someone down in Europe who made the machine in the 90's, and paid him ~30k as well as food and board to give us a new floppy and "train" us on the machine again, and although that seems exorbitant, that's what they'd rather do than buy a newer version of the machine that would cost 100k+. I'm not joking, I've seen companies put floppy disks in *vaults* because they don't know that they can transfer the files and order floppy disks.
Hospital in my town got an USB floppy disk drive still plugged in their computer. It appears they were using these to transfer Files over The post office but i think their computers cloud already connect to internet back in 2000s. So yea you Are right this
Lab I worked at had a calibration setup for measuring tools that ran off a DOS PC. You could only get the calibration results on a floppy disk. All custom in house developed 25 years ago, not sure how expensive it would be to replace.
From what I found on the Chuck E Cheese wiki: "To run a new show, the location is sent a software upgrade floppy disk along with the DVD, which includes the programming."
I used to love it when AOL sent me a new free floppy disk in the mail! A little tape over the notch, a quick format and I never had to buy floppies again! Well... until they started sending CDROMs... Doh!
This reminded me of my Uni days, when people kept all their work on one disk just for it to fail at that crucial time before handing it in. It amazed me how many people didn’t back up their work. I think 'My floppy is corrupted' was the Uni version of 'The dog ate my homework".
From what I've experienced with recently getting a 1.44 MB Floppy Drive for my 98 machine and testing floppies, the ones that were showing a DIR listing but not copying any data probably only have their FAT intact, in 99% of cases, you can format them with windows and they will work fine for quite a while, so, you just got 20+ useable disks from a batch of 100, not bad!
24:33 I would not be surprised if they still use floppies, the animatronics were built a long time ago and I'm sure it would cost more to upgrade all of them than it is to just make new floppies. I've seen hobbyists get Rockafire Explosion sets working, and those did run on floppies.
Keep doing what you do man, you're one of the best retro tech focused youtubers on here. You're bound to reach mainstream success in the tech community someday.
Several comments have said "try and reformat", I've got one better. Try running a disk repair software just to see if you can recover the disks. Most times if they can't be recovered then they can't be reformatted. There are still plenty of recovery programs available, some run in DOS some in Windows. As to their effectiveness that remains to be seen.
The "Relentless" floppy disk its from the game by Adeline Software Relentless: Little Big Adventure (hence why the file is named LBA) it must be the third disk on the installation of the game, not that this changes things because its a pirated copy and you dont have the other disks in order for that to be of any use.
Not really. This is just random disks with no relation to each other (plus you know they're mostly not going to work). Installing a software suite comprising dozens of disk where one bad disk, even just a partially damaged disk, will ruin a maybe hours-long process, so it remains not exactly a pleasant experience IMO.
Also may be these diskettes can be reused with full format (this will be deactivate the corrupt sectors), but i don't know if this is gonna work or not.
I formatted 10 diskettes I bought online, 7 said they were not able to work, but after formatting them all came back to life, not with the full capacity but they work
all been though a disk demagnetizer to wipe them just in case there is personal info on them. a lot of the time they will format fine with a few bad sectors
@@LovelyAlanna I also ordered 50 floppys, but I could not format them, it said that they were write protected even though they were not, I used a program for repairing bad sectors but only a handful of them started working, but I can't get anything on them because it still says it is write protected.
I came across many floppes that were thrown away that were trash and refused to even complete a format in dos/windows. I had a trick to ressurect these floppies though and that was using XCopy on an amiga 500. It would validate each sector as it was written and whenever it would fail you could press "R" to retry. What I did was tape the R button down and that did the trick.. Most floppies started working again after a certain amount of retries and after that they would often become reliable again and even formated fine in dos.
Have a case when client bring me floppy with their genealogy familly tree very important to him and cant read it, after trying with 6-7 good drives and maybe 30+ tries suddenly one of drives manage to read it and even copy all files from disk.
It seems obvious that we pushed floppy densities a little too far. In my experience most lower density disks are fine unless the oxide layer starts falling off.
just started watching the video but a method i have which sometimes works for when it wont format or has bad sectors is to low level erase them with a big neodymium magnet from a hdd. A few times it worked and after passing the magnet in circles over the diskette and reformatting they worked again and some time it also fixed some bad sectors.
Did you test a couple of disk using vgacopy? A great tool to copy a disk an check the integrity of the disk. The defective sectors are displayed. Helped a lot of students back in the day!
They might not be working, but they sure are a lot of fun to collect! These have personality just like the cassette tapes do, with all those colors and styles. I doubt CDs come even close to this level, and this is also considered an obsolete medium today.
Michael: _ * Tries to copy a potentially naughty picture * _ PC: _ * Throws up error and doesn’t * _ Michael: “Well that’s unfortunate.” Now we know what’s on your mind. Lol 😜
I'd bet they had some basic DOS based system that controlled the animatronics or video screens so the floppy was the way to keep them updated. Where I worked they had some kind of metal working machine that has a modern PC connected to it, but inside of it, it has a paper tape reader. Apparently long ago it was upgraded so a rs232 port pushed data into the paper tape reader board, so that's why it was perfectly happy connected to a Windows 10 PC with some special software. But it also had some kind of computer looking thing inside of it that was unplugged that looked like it could have been a mid 80s rack mount PC. So it may have "just worked" with the old system and they didn't want to re-do it.
I think why some of the Floppy Disk were working was probably because of miss judgment or information. Sometimes it can be the drive itself and people think that the floppy disk was dirty but it was their drive instead
Just for shits and giggles I called both numbers. The warranty number actually worked but I got put through to a voice mail system since I called at night but the technical support number is no longer in service. Maybe try calling them on a work day.
i was expecting michael to be completely calm at the start. *I aM sO eXcItEd I aM sO eXcItEd To ChEcK aLl ThEsE fLoPpY dIsKs ThIs Is GoInG tO bE sO eXcItiNg*
It's crazy how much of the backbones of America's industries still runs on DOS. I worked at Walmart, their entire shipment and ordering system is still based on a DOS terminal program called the SMART system. They only recently started upgrading their infrastructure- they use VMWare now for all their computers, at least the ones that the pleb workers use. Managers get a normal Windows install.
3½" and 3" floppies were never very reliable. Back in the day I copied each disk onto itself just to retain the contents. A recent test most of my 3½" floppies found most failed. But surprisingly nearly all of my 5¼" and 8" floppies are still working. I'm lucky because I backed up images of my most important floppies to CD-ROM...
The earlier 3.5" floppies were OK, but the quality got really bad in the 90s as they started to become obsolete - many disks from the last 5-8 years of mainstream production have crazy failure rates.
I'm assuming the .cec stands for Chuck E Cheese. Also, It's probably animatronic updates for the show. The animatronics were created back in the late 80's early 90's for Show Biz Pizza (Rock A Fire Explosion). CEC gained the shows when they merged with Showbiz Pizza. I'm assuming they never upgraded the computer system and are using period appropriate computers to run it, therefore floppys make sense.
Insert Disk Number 348 out of 528 and Strike Any Key When Ready.............buzz buzz grind grind buzz........I/O Error reading disk A: ...bort etry gnore R .I/O Error reading disk A: ...bort etry gnore R .I/O Error reading disk A: ...bort etry gnore .........
Hey Michael, I'm amazed that you got 1 floppy disk to work. Now you could clone that whole floppy disk to another drive and upload it so one of your viewers can analyze it. Also what about trying to low level format the 100 floppy disks to see if you can resurrect it back to life?
I haven't used floppies since the early 2000s. Does the inability to read a floppy sector indicate a physically damaged sector like a hdd? Or is it salvageable by writing over the unreadable sector?
some one beat me to it `^` but yes, the "show 3" is for the animaltronics, it prolly contains the information for what each character will do as in movements and songs and such, like timing info, and, some for the lights or stage effects. pretty amazing u have that, id archive it if u haven't yet
I have old 5-1/4" floppies...some no longer work, but other still DO and I still have a very usable DOS computer...from the 80's. The 80's keyboard I still use on my Windows 10 computer with a few adapters. I wish I could find an adapter which I could use an old 5-1/4" floppy drive. It's a pain to switch computers like that
oh my god I want the 3DS4/3D studio 4 disk so much. A working cracked copy of this specific software is on my list of things I want to get my hands on. Shame it's corrupted.
A bit late, but always try a different drive when you get as many disks failing as in this video. Head alignment is a thing on physical drives, and while it's a long shot, it may have helped. I've still got my old C64 and Amiga 500, along with boxes upon boxes of disks - most of which still work perfectly fine. Those disks are from the 80's and 90's. Heat is the biggest killer of floppy disks, and by virtue sunlight.
I was quite successful in the past recovering disks with these sorts of errors by a variant on the much suggested method of reformatting them, only with a twist. I used to first reformat using the switches for an unconditional format to 720k & then follow by formatting to the full capacity again. Other approaches that sometimes work: scandisk (surface scan, only works occasionally) running spinrite on them (extremely slow) writing a (blank will do) disk image to them
Yes, that is a show update disk. Cyberstar is the show controller. We had one from when our location was a ShowBiz to run our 3-stage show. It took a video source, with 1 audio channel for the audio that went out to the speakers, the other channel was encoded data that the cyberstar show controller decoded and used to activate the motions in synch with the on screen video and audio. Our shows, and likely theirs too came on DVD, but ours originally came on reel to reel as the video source. Ours didn't need floppies, because it was a more primitive show. That studio C show only had 1 animatronic figure, Chuck E. himself. As opposed to our 4 or 5 main characters + a few background. There were actual 2 versions of studio-c, one with 16 movements, and one with 32. The 32 moment one looks pretty slick, even if it only had Chuck E. himself with everything else on video screens. But I'm betting it has an actual computer controlling it and that disk, along with an accompanying DVD are apart of the update package they issue every time the put out a new show every few months. Sadly I hear they're removing all of their animatronic stage shows since it's not the techical marvel to the kids anymore, and expensive to maintain. But if you want to see what our 3 stage show looked like under Showbiz, look up Rock-a-fire Explosion on here. Then when it becake Chuck E. Cheese, you can look up the Chuck E. Cheese 3 stage show. I also have seen where someone uploaded an instructional video for those showbiz locations becoming Chuck E. Cheese on how to change to the new show, called Concept Unification. And there's another show called C-stage that has all the members, but looks kinda like a watered down 3-stage show. And like I said, you can look up the Studio-C show to see what this disk would've been a part of running.
13:25 "...because that's at the very beginning of the disk..." There is no relation between the position where a file appears with the dir command and the physical position on the disk. It was just a coincidence. The file could be anywhere on the disk
a lot of companies use old stuff, walmarts underlying system is from 1990, and the registers run software that is very clearly from the late 90s, with nothing but software updates. the register computers aren’t exactly underpowered(to my knowledge they have 8gb of ram) but it is sooo slow from the software that it runs on.
Doesn't Windows support the feature of when you start typing something more specifically the file names and pressing the tab key to autocomplete the rest?
You can try formatting them, if the formatting completes you will probably have a good part of them working again, and you can also see how much of them is damaged. I did this just today with about 50 floppies that i could not access and 8 of them were 100% perfect after formatting, 10 were completely broken and the rest working with between 3 and 50 KB of damaged sectors
Found out "Broken" is relative, Some just might gotten recorded with a misaligned drive head. Found HD diskette's with not one but two perfectly readable file systems including intact files next to each other. Both of them were so far out of whack they didn't even corrupted each others files. So someone managed to cram 2.88MB on a 1.44MB Disk.
How do English-speakers differentiate between a hard floppy and a soft floppy? In Finnish, "korppu" (literally: cracker) refers to a hard diskette and "lerppu" (floppy) to a soft one ("lerpahtaa" is a slang term for something softening).
You should try to repair some of these with Norton Disk Doctor and see if the issue is fixed. Could be table allocation issue or something that Norton can fix.... :-) Try it, you may be surprised. Also try “safe formatting” under Norton the ones that don’t read at all or some of the readable but not copy capable disks.
Thanks to some software i ran on XP and 98 i was able to recover dozens of diskettes that could not be formatted (at first). Some recovered to 100% capacity without errors. The majority that recovered were imation\3m disks.
It will be cool to see what happens with that one diskette. I wonder, if you were to erase the other disks that read but would not copy, would they be functional as blank disks?
I'm not surprised Chuck E Cheese would still be using floppy disks in 2016, but I am surprised Chuck E Cheese was still a thing then. Maybe. I'm not sure if it's even a thing today, IS chuck e cheese still active??? I would have assumed covid would have murdered it by now :l
Yeah, or course the 2017 one would work, since it's still fresh, relatively speaking. Give it five more years and you can add it to the stack. I'd suggest making a backup soon.
Some of these might be Apple/Mac format. Also i experienced if you created a disk in one machine, it would come up "corrupted" in a different one. Had is happen all the time in computer lab in the mid 90's. My teachers had to assign some students a permanent terminal, so that our work wasn't lost. (Because most of the time you didn't have assigned computers in class.)
Hey Michael, just out of curiosity, since none of the data is worth much today. Have you considered seeing if you could reformat any of the disks? sometimes a reformat will repair any damage if it's a file system corruption. If it's physical damage, or simply worn out material, that will probably be non reparable. It's worth a shot though.
I wonder, as I had similar issue between 2 drives (created a disk with a usb disk drive and try to use it on an old computer which results in read errors like these) if the drive is not misaligned for those disks?
Chuck E. Cheese uses those floppy disks to control the animatronics. Also I wonder if a software like Recuva can pull some of the files off those disks.
Since many have requested it, here's an archive of that Chuck E. Cheese Floppy! archive.org/details/cec_floppy
Why Chuck E Cheese!Thats From Dora Birthday!
Im Trying Insert Broken Floppy Disk. It Didnt Work Because Its Broken.
Hmmm maybe I'll try and write a script that can read these .cec files... maybe not, but I'll look into it :)
I downloaded it
@@neonsparklestarlightgamer2153 yeah in msdos limbo x86
Yes the Chuck E. Cheese Floppies are designed to run the animatronics and lights and from what I can tell they are still using them for their older systems... some of the older systems still run windows 98 apparently. By the way sometimes you can save a disk if you format them... The stack that you had read the directory might be salvageable
@@damian9303 Use Floppy Disk Console. If You in Boris OS and CrappyOperatingSystem. Floppy Disk Console is can see Console of Setup.
@@neonsparklestarlightgamer2153 wtf does that even mean
@@pocketlightt I have no idea.
@@friendlytexangamer9582 i actually think i know now
they are talking about fake os's in goanimate lmao
@@pocketlightt oh yeah lol
This is kinda neat, just the file names alone kind of tell a story.
especially binikis3.jpg
But most inportantly where is bikinis1 and 2
@@SimbianGaming and perhaps 4, 5...
bikini
@@SimbianGaming we simply must know. Its probably on another floppy disk
Yes I definitely think so. It's such a shame Michael couldn't read the files.
24:58 Yep! We're laughing now, but there's a lot of companies using old machines and have no choice but to use floppy disks. I'm a chemical engineering, and I've seen laboratories doing work with floppies when analyzing patients' samples because no manager wants to be the one who spends money on a new machine or instrument during their term, it's a game of hot potato. The floppies at those companies are treated like gold, and someone was actually fired because they flicked the back of it or maybe touched the sensitive part of it too much, deleting the data, and the company actually tracked someone down in Europe who made the machine in the 90's, and paid him ~30k as well as food and board to give us a new floppy and "train" us on the machine again, and although that seems exorbitant, that's what they'd rather do than buy a newer version of the machine that would cost 100k+. I'm not joking, I've seen companies put floppy disks in *vaults* because they don't know that they can transfer the files and order floppy disks.
I can transfer everything to a USB drive and sell them a floppy emulator for only $20,000 ;)
Yea my dad has a whole bunch of them
Hospital in my town got an USB floppy disk drive still plugged in their computer. It appears they were using these to transfer Files over The post office but i think their computers cloud already connect to internet back in 2000s. So yea you Are right this
Lab I worked at had a calibration setup for measuring tools that ran off a DOS PC. You could only get the calibration results on a floppy disk. All custom in house developed 25 years ago, not sure how expensive it would be to replace.
Gotek drives would get rid of this issue immediately
From what I found on the Chuck E Cheese wiki: "To run a new show, the location is sent a software upgrade floppy disk along with the DVD, which includes the programming."
A DVD and a floppy? Wow!
Chuck E Cheese still uses floppy Disks, also there is the Show Biz Pizza logo on the floppy disk instead of the current logo they have been using.
Maybe Chuck E Cheese really is just freddy fazbears irl
@@1Soniccool that's the Pizza Time Theater logo designed by Nolan Bushnell there Founder. It's a Studio C disk.
No wonder, the animatroics and software is from the 80s.
Just imagine there's some guy out there that makes the Chuck e Cheese programs but he is completely unaware floppy discs are no longer mainstream.
I can't imagine that.
"Dude, what's that reflective little circle u got there? A CD? That sounds **tubular** broo"
I used to love it when AOL sent me a new free floppy disk in the mail! A little tape over the notch, a quick format and I never had to buy floppies again! Well... until they started sending CDROMs... Doh!
Do you still have the floppies
@@Xnoob545 I would have to dig deep in the basement archives but I know I still have some floppies somewhere :)
Noice
How many disks didn't do you have
(Floppys and CDs)
This reminded me of my Uni days, when people kept all their work on one disk just for it to fail at that crucial time before handing it in. It amazed me how many people didn’t back up their work. I think 'My floppy is corrupted' was the Uni version of 'The dog ate my homework".
From what I've experienced with recently getting a 1.44 MB Floppy Drive for my 98 machine and testing floppies, the ones that were showing a DIR listing but not copying any data probably only have their FAT intact, in 99% of cases, you can format them with windows and they will work fine for quite a while, so, you just got 20+ useable disks from a batch of 100, not bad!
Not just the FAT; the root directory has to also be intact for it to actually list the files.
@@OrangeShellGaming still, you get my point xD
@@OrangeShellGaming Cant you low level format them though?
24:33 I would not be surprised if they still use floppies, the animatronics were built a long time ago and I'm sure it would cost more to upgrade all of them than it is to just make new floppies. I've seen hobbyists get Rockafire Explosion sets working, and those did run on floppies.
Now run Norton Disk doctor on the disks with "SECTOR NOT FOUND" or "DATA ERROR"
But the Norton disk was bad! (I know, he probably already has it on the Win98 PC.)
Keep doing what you do man, you're one of the best retro tech focused youtubers on here. You're bound to reach mainstream success in the tech community someday.
I really appreciate that! Thanks so much : )
Several comments have said "try and reformat", I've got one better. Try running a disk repair software just to see if you can recover the disks. Most times if they can't be recovered then they can't be reformatted.
There are still plenty of recovery programs available, some run in DOS some in Windows. As to their effectiveness that remains to be seen.
The "Relentless" floppy disk its from the game by Adeline Software Relentless: Little Big Adventure (hence why the file is named LBA) it must be the third disk on the installation of the game, not that this changes things because its a pirated copy and you dont have the other disks in order for that to be of any use.
YES! Our speculations were correct. You did this :)
ok
@@PlanetComputer ok
@Doctor Smiles ok
ok
ok
Who wants RAW FOOTAGE of this video :) Almost 2 hours and 30 minutes :D
Me
me
Me too 26 minutes on youtube and almost 2 hours and 30 minutes of raw footage
Everybody and welcome
It would be like LGR's dot matrix hotdog banner all over again
This video is the beginning of a creepypasta.
Alternate title : Viewers annoy Michael with 100 Broken Floppy Disks...
Sorry for bad english, i am a german guy
RetroGamer_64 You wrote everything the correct way good job!
your english is perfect
Don't underestimate yourself bud. You did nothing wrong.
You honestly have better grammar than most people on this site
@@smd89xx Thank you very much!
Honestly I kinda want a "Data error reading drive A" shirt 😂 (I have a design idea on my mind might do it later 👀)
That's cool, man! Hope this gets seen.
I had that shirt many years ago...
we NEED a subredit mate!
I said NIGHTMARE to "Installing Office 97 from 46 disks" but this is the REAL NIGHTMARE.
Not really. This is just random disks with no relation to each other (plus you know they're mostly not going to work). Installing a software suite comprising dozens of disk where one bad disk, even just a partially damaged disk, will ruin a maybe hours-long process, so it remains not exactly a pleasant experience IMO.
This is one of the (if not THE) first videos I watched on this channel. Been subscribed ever since. Keep doing what you do, Mr. MJD
Wow, love to see your enthusiasm in this one, also the intro was pretty fresh for this channel!
Thank you!
Also may be these diskettes can be reused with full format (this will be deactivate the corrupt sectors), but i don't know if this is gonna work or not.
I formatted 10 diskettes I bought online, 7 said they were not able to work, but after formatting them all came back to life, not with the full capacity but they work
all been though a disk demagnetizer to wipe them just in case there is personal info on them.
a lot of the time they will format fine with a few bad sectors
@@LovelyAlanna I also ordered 50 floppys, but I could not format them, it said that they were write protected even though they were not, I used a program for repairing bad sectors but only a handful of them started working, but I can't get anything on them because it still says it is write protected.
I came across many floppes that were thrown away that were trash and refused to even complete a format in dos/windows.
I had a trick to ressurect these floppies though and that was using XCopy on an amiga 500. It would validate each sector as it was written and whenever it would fail you could press "R" to retry. What I did was tape the R button down and that did the trick.. Most floppies started working again after a certain amount of retries and after that they would often become reliable again and even formated fine in dos.
Intresting
Have a case when client bring me floppy with their genealogy familly tree very important to him and cant read it, after trying with 6-7 good drives and maybe 30+ tries suddenly one of drives manage to read it and even copy all files from disk.
I can feel the enthusiasm you had the whole video. You make great content, keep it up!
Pretty awesome how the most interesting floppy disk in that bunch is the one that survived.
It seems obvious that we pushed floppy densities a little too far. In my experience most lower density disks are fine unless the oxide layer starts falling off.
Yes those are likely for the animatronics, Remember, the animatronics are over 30 years old, so it wouldn't be a surprise if they never updated it.
Fun fact: chuck e cheese's used floppy discs the entire time they used animatronics r.i.p the animatronics
just started watching the video but a method i have which sometimes works for when it wont format or has bad sectors is to low level erase them with a big neodymium magnet from a hdd. A few times it worked and after passing the magnet in circles over the diskette and reformatting they worked again and some time it also fixed some bad sectors.
Cool video Michael! I love watching floppy discs go in and out it gives me a sense of nostalgia! Thank you!
Did you test a couple of disk using vgacopy? A great tool to copy a disk an check the integrity of the disk. The defective sectors are displayed. Helped a lot of students back in the day!
Alternative title: youtuber finds out the secret of a company because of his viewers spams
That intro is a thing of beauty. Had to watch it 3 times for full appreciation of hearing Michael sounding like he's not chill and happy.... 😂🍍
The things you put yourself through for our entertainment lol.
ok
I always loved the diskette seeking noise. I miss the ol days
They might not be working, but they sure are a lot of fun to collect! These have personality just like the cassette tapes do, with all those colors and styles. I doubt CDs come even close to this level, and this is also considered an obsolete medium today.
For some reason I just watched a guy try to read floppies for 26 minutes. I regret nothing.
Michael: _ * Tries to copy a potentially naughty picture * _
PC: _ * Throws up error and doesn’t * _
Michael: “Well that’s unfortunate.”
Now we know what’s on your mind. Lol 😜
"im doing this one handed"
time stamp
@@jenselenaromero9871 I guess someone doesn't want to watch Michael's video. But if you really must know, it's from 8:27.
I'd bet they had some basic DOS based system that controlled the animatronics or video screens so the floppy was the way to keep them updated. Where I worked they had some kind of metal working machine that has a modern PC connected to it, but inside of it, it has a paper tape reader. Apparently long ago it was upgraded so a rs232 port pushed data into the paper tape reader board, so that's why it was perfectly happy connected to a Windows 10 PC with some special software. But it also had some kind of computer looking thing inside of it that was unplugged that looked like it could have been a mid 80s rack mount PC. So it may have "just worked" with the old system and they didn't want to re-do it.
ok
Well at least we know they are very thorough when it comes to testing disks.
Yes, I really do think that was for controlling the animatronic shows.
I think why some of the Floppy Disk were working was probably because of miss judgment or information. Sometimes it can be the drive itself and people think that the floppy disk was dirty but it was their drive instead
22:51 there is an Apr17 executable on the C drive. It's from that floppy
Please say that Chuck E Cheese diskette is imaged.
Also, would the other readable floppies be usable if you formatted them?
Yes a woks!
Try calling the warranty number and get the rest of the set?
Timothy Seders 😂😂😂😂😂
Just for shits and giggles I called both numbers. The warranty number actually worked but I got put through to a voice mail system since I called at night but the technical support number is no longer in service. Maybe try calling them on a work day.
Your channel is very underrated...... You deserve more subscribers as your videos are really interesting
I got floppies and cassettes that have outlived CDS, its how well you look after them, store them and use them.. still got hundreds of working disks
hey Michael i work at chuck e cheese and we still use floppy disks but you also need a dvd with the programming
bikinis3.jpg
*you already know what it is* 😏
1 copy file
@@nacroni A girl IN 3 bikinis
i was expecting michael to be completely calm at the start.
*I aM sO eXcItEd I aM sO eXcItEd To ChEcK aLl ThEsE fLoPpY dIsKs ThIs Is GoInG tO bE sO eXcItiNg*
Let me assure you the old 5-1/4" disks last a LOT LONGER than the 3-1/2 disks
That intro is GOLD
It's crazy how much of the backbones of America's industries still runs on DOS. I worked at Walmart, their entire shipment and ordering system is still based on a DOS terminal program called the SMART system. They only recently started upgrading their infrastructure- they use VMWare now for all their computers, at least the ones that the pleb workers use. Managers get a normal Windows install.
It is very much so not DOS. You get a shell, but it's openSUSE Linux that is running on an IBM Z Mainframe.
imagine he just started an animatronic show in some random chuck e cheese somewhere
3½" and 3" floppies were never very reliable.
Back in the day I copied each disk onto itself just to retain the contents.
A recent test most of my 3½" floppies found most failed.
But surprisingly nearly all of my 5¼" and 8" floppies are still working.
I'm lucky because I backed up images of my most important floppies to CD-ROM...
The earlier 3.5" floppies were OK, but the quality got really bad in the 90s as they started to become obsolete - many disks from the last 5-8 years of mainstream production have crazy failure rates.
Also the quality of the drive will effect whether it reads a disk or not...
The song: Don't copy that floppy
Michael: Alright folks, let's try to copy 100 random floppies!
I'm assuming the .cec stands for Chuck E Cheese.
Also, It's probably animatronic updates for the show. The animatronics were created back in the late 80's early 90's for Show Biz Pizza (Rock A Fire Explosion). CEC gained the shows when they merged with Showbiz Pizza. I'm assuming they never upgraded the computer system and are using period appropriate computers to run it, therefore floppys make sense.
Insert Disk Number 348 out of 528 and Strike Any Key When Ready.............buzz buzz grind grind buzz........I/O Error reading disk A:
...bort etry gnore
R
.I/O Error reading disk A:
...bort etry gnore
R
.I/O Error reading disk A:
...bort etry gnore
.........
Have you considered doing a history video on Microsoft Sam, the text-to-speech voice that is used as a meme by today's standards?
Hey Michael, I'm amazed that you got 1 floppy disk to work. Now you could clone that whole floppy disk to another drive and upload it so one of your viewers can analyze it. Also what about trying to low level format the 100 floppy disks to see if you can resurrect it back to life?
I haven't used floppies since the early 2000s. Does the inability to read a floppy sector indicate a physically damaged sector like a hdd? Or is it salvageable by writing over the unreadable sector?
some one beat me to it `^` but yes, the "show 3" is for the animaltronics, it prolly contains the information for what each character will do as in movements and songs and such, like timing info, and, some for the lights or stage effects. pretty amazing u have that, id archive it if u haven't yet
Loved the suspense of this video!
I have old 5-1/4" floppies...some no longer work, but other still DO and I still have a very usable DOS computer...from the 80's. The 80's keyboard I still use on my Windows 10 computer with a few adapters. I wish I could find an adapter which I could use an old 5-1/4" floppy drive. It's a pain to switch computers like that
oh my god I want the 3DS4/3D studio 4 disk so much. A working cracked copy of this specific software is on my list of things I want to get my hands on. Shame it's corrupted.
Great video also do you still have that wireless card on the windows 98 pc? Lol
Yeah its still installed in it!
I remember many years ago that when sensitive FDs were disposed of, I had to physically dismantle them and shred the contents.
A bit late, but always try a different drive when you get as many disks failing as in this video. Head alignment is a thing on physical drives, and while it's a long shot, it may have helped.
I've still got my old C64 and Amiga 500, along with boxes upon boxes of disks - most of which still work perfectly fine. Those disks are from the 80's and 90's. Heat is the biggest killer of floppy disks, and by virtue sunlight.
Great one, MJD!
are your gonna format them or throw them away?
how about a classic 386/486 pc for older style software?
I was quite successful in the past recovering disks with these sorts of errors by a variant on the much suggested method of reformatting them, only with a twist.
I used to first reformat using the switches for an unconditional format to 720k & then follow by formatting to the full capacity again.
Other approaches that sometimes work:
scandisk (surface scan, only works occasionally)
running spinrite on them (extremely slow)
writing a (blank will do) disk image to them
i would die for that cec disk.... it's so wild seeing the original logo from 1977 on a floppy disk from 2017
Yes, that is a show update disk. Cyberstar is the show controller. We had one from when our location was a ShowBiz to run our 3-stage show. It took a video source, with 1 audio channel for the audio that went out to the speakers, the other channel was encoded data that the cyberstar show controller decoded and used to activate the motions in synch with the on screen video and audio. Our shows, and likely theirs too came on DVD, but ours originally came on reel to reel as the video source. Ours didn't need floppies, because it was a more primitive show. That studio C show only had 1 animatronic figure, Chuck E. himself. As opposed to our 4 or 5 main characters + a few background. There were actual 2 versions of studio-c, one with 16 movements, and one with 32. The 32 moment one looks pretty slick, even if it only had Chuck E. himself with everything else on video screens. But I'm betting it has an actual computer controlling it and that disk, along with an accompanying DVD are apart of the update package they issue every time the put out a new show every few months. Sadly I hear they're removing all of their animatronic stage shows since it's not the techical marvel to the kids anymore, and expensive to maintain. But if you want to see what our 3 stage show looked like under Showbiz, look up Rock-a-fire Explosion on here. Then when it becake Chuck E. Cheese, you can look up the Chuck E. Cheese 3 stage show. I also have seen where someone uploaded an instructional video for those showbiz locations becoming Chuck E. Cheese on how to change to the new show, called Concept Unification. And there's another show called C-stage that has all the members, but looks kinda like a watered down 3-stage show. And like I said, you can look up the Studio-C show to see what this disk would've been a part of running.
Whats impossible is getting like from MJD
Broken floppy disks. 💾
13:25 "...because that's at the very beginning of the disk..." There is no relation between the position where a file appears with the dir command and the physical position on the disk. It was just a coincidence. The file could be anywhere on the disk
I miss these classic floppy disks :(
a lot of companies use old stuff, walmarts underlying system is from 1990, and the registers run software that is very clearly from the late 90s, with nothing but software updates. the register computers aren’t exactly underpowered(to my knowledge they have 8gb of ram) but it is sooo slow from the software that it runs on.
Whom ever disliked this video is one of the broken floppys
The intro to this video is 11/10.
Doesn't Windows support the feature of when you start typing something more specifically the file names and pressing the tab key to autocomplete the rest?
RIP floppy disk drive
You can try formatting them, if the formatting completes you will probably have a good part of them working again, and you can also see how much of them is damaged. I did this just today with about 50 floppies that i could not access and 8 of them were 100% perfect after formatting, 10 were completely broken and the rest working with between 3 and 50 KB of damaged sectors
One of the few times i heard excitement in MJD's voice
Man seeing a floppy disk takes me back to the good old days. Though if you think of it floppy disks are just humongus sdhc cards
Bro PLEASE make a subreddit. The memes for this video alone are gonna be epic.
id do it but im too lazy to mod
Found out "Broken" is relative, Some just might gotten recorded with a misaligned drive head.
Found HD diskette's with not one but two perfectly readable file systems including intact files next to each other.
Both of them were so far out of whack they didn't even corrupted each others files.
So someone managed to cram 2.88MB on a 1.44MB Disk.
How do English-speakers differentiate between a hard floppy and a soft floppy? In Finnish, "korppu" (literally: cracker) refers to a hard diskette and "lerppu" (floppy) to a soft one ("lerpahtaa" is a slang term for something softening).
5:54 *justin has been real quiet since this vid has been posted*
You should try to repair some of these with Norton Disk Doctor and see if the issue is fixed. Could be table allocation issue or something that Norton can fix.... :-)
Try it, you may be surprised.
Also try “safe formatting” under Norton the ones that don’t read at all or some of the readable but not copy capable disks.
Thanks to some software i ran on XP and 98 i was able to recover dozens of diskettes that could not be formatted (at first).
Some recovered to 100% capacity without errors.
The majority that recovered were imation\3m disks.
what was the software
It will be cool to see what happens with that one diskette. I wonder, if you were to erase the other disks that read but would not copy, would they be functional as blank disks?
For the Bad Sector Disks, have you tried Defragmenting them?
I'm not surprised Chuck E Cheese would still be using floppy disks in 2016, but I am surprised Chuck E Cheese was still a thing then. Maybe. I'm not sure if it's even a thing today, IS chuck e cheese still active??? I would have assumed covid would have murdered it by now :l
If you have access to a Greaseweazle and a spare 3.5” drive you could try to get a flux image of the disks to see what are on them.
Yeah, or course the 2017 one would work, since it's still fresh, relatively speaking.
Give it five more years and you can add it to the stack. I'd suggest making a backup soon.
I've still got 3.5" disks from the 90's that work on my Amiga. Age is not the best way to determine a disks health, it's how you store them.
Some of these might be Apple/Mac format.
Also i experienced if you created a disk in one machine, it would come up "corrupted" in a different one.
Had is happen all the time in computer lab in the mid 90's. My teachers had to assign some students a permanent terminal, so that our work wasn't lost. (Because most of the time you didn't have assigned computers in class.)
The chucky cheese disk is actually the patch that allows them to roam at night so their servos don't lock up... Wait...
Hey Michael, just out of curiosity, since none of the data is worth much today. Have you considered seeing if you could reformat any of the disks? sometimes a reformat will repair any damage if it's a file system corruption. If it's physical damage, or simply worn out material, that will probably be non reparable. It's worth a shot though.
Awesome video, Michael!
I wonder, as I had similar issue between 2 drives (created a disk with a usb disk drive and try to use it on an old computer which results in read errors like these) if the drive is not misaligned for those disks?
Chuck E. Cheese uses those floppy disks to control the animatronics. Also I wonder if a software like Recuva can pull some of the files off those disks.