This Rather Mysterious Teac 3.5" Cleaning Disk 

Wow, I didn't expect one of the 3D printed parts I made to show up on LGR. This doubly made my morning!

We actually sold those Teac cleaners. There were 2 types, that one you have and another that had a sort of paper "disk" that you added fluid to and they would spin up and take some of the dirt off the heads when you did the old DIR prompt thing - snake oil or not they sold well and I have a strange memory that the sales rep said that "dry" one you have had a special coating that attracted the dirt ordinary disks would leave on the heads (like cassette heads) and because of that you didn't need fluid. And strange as it may seem they did seem to work. I would assume by now though any "coating" would have worn off/evaporated but I can confirm I got at least 2 computers working again that would not read from the A: drive using them.

"Clint why are you cleaning floppy drives at 4AM?" "Because I've lost control of my life"

I worked at University years ago, and we used brand-new 3.5 disks for cleaning. Format the disk 3-5 times, drive is now clean! The disk used for cleaning would get put in our 'free disk' pile. We ran tests to compare cloth/alcohol systems and new disks....new disks always worked better for cleaning. Since there were lots of bone-headed grad students, we taught everyone the 'new disk' trick. Worked every time!

Be kind, rewind that floppy.

LGR is more confused at the end of the video, then the beginning. I nominate this for video of the year.

That music is The 4 Seasons by Vivaldi. In case any one was wondering

"Plop, greetings, blerbs, whatnot" If that isnt a ringtone, I dont know what is...

Some day LGR will accidentally summon the Old Gods using a random floppy disc he found.

9:33 Clint slowly descends into floppy disk madness...

when you're out of focus, it's not LGR blerbs but LGR blurs

I don't care if it doesn't do anything. Those animations are super cute.

"It is not 4 in the morning. I am not that insane". Well well I guess I'm insane.

That label has strong "Change da world. My final message. Goodbye" energy

RU-vid: hey, want to watch a guy being confused with an old floppy disk? Me: kinda

I think it's a placebo, just like those fake cleanup apps on phones nowadays that don't actually cleanup at all. Kudos for the effort put into the disc though. They could easily show a simple text prompt but went ahead and put full on animation and music on this thing.

My first instinct when the files didn't show up in DOS on the Windows 98 PC was "oh, they're hidden, so dir/ah". The music is Vivaldi's Four seasons, but they're not in the right season. When the computer date is April it plays Winter and in July it plays Spring.

3:49 Lovely bit of broken English in the instructions: "Other Personal Computor (sic) and Word Professor" 😆

Mark personally helped me set up my IBM 5155 with XT-IDE. He’s a great dude and makes some cool, niche products. So cool to see him featured here!

0:00 LGR channeling his inner-Brutalmoose.

I had a bunch of 5.25 in floppies I needed to clean a few years back (they had been stored in someone's garage so a lot of them had mold or something on them), and to make it more possible I constructed a device with my Lego Mindstorms NXT to aid me. Wish I had a picture of it, i had a retractable arm for the spindle and used one of the wheels wrapped with rubber bands to turn the disk, with a wheel with a tire being what I used to turn it with my hand. I also had the data window rest on a piece that I attached a microfiber cloth to.

I remember some VHS cleaners were regular tapes coated with a cleaning solution. I wonder if the same thing is going on here. If that's the case, the solution is probably long gone by now.

I’m just old enough to have barely used some floppy disks when I was a kid, and have been watching your videos for years. This is literally the first time I learned floppy disks have an actual disk that spins inside of them. I literally just thought that the tape was a static tape that somehow held that much data, and now I feel silly :)

I haven't used a floppy disk in years, and I just watched an 11 minute video on a head-cleaning floppy. Nice job.

Maintenance made easy. How responsible!

From the makers of your favorite DVD rewinder. This is certainly a unique one.

Oh man, I had one of these! When I saw that cleaning boy you actually opened a part of my brain that hasn't seen the light of day for over 20 years. I haven't thought of this stupid thing for so long but I completely remember the animation now, thanks...I guess.

Clint, I think you've got 1/2 of a complete set. I didn't have this but I had something similar. This TEAC seems to be a region specific thing. What I had was a more generic floppy drive cleaner, which came with two discs: one was the traditional cleaning head, the other one came with a cleaning program, that did something similar. Basically, you would put the data disc in first, wait for it to load, and it would prompt you to insert the other disc. The loaded program would run a specific set of drive command to spin the cleaning disc.

Time traveling troll disk from 25 years ago 😁

That was the great part about midi files. You could fit tons of them on a floppy disk.

3:49 "OTHER PERSONAL COMPUTOR & WORD PROFESSOR" 😂😂😂

I was gonna say it reminds of me VCR head cleaners! The blank tapes you run through the machine to clean them. Really glad you got it figured out though!

My guess it's working like one of those VCR head cleaning VHS tapes that show stuff on screen as it cleans. Magnetic media going across the head can usually dislodge dirt as it runs. Maybe it's doing it like that? A dry cleaner as opposed to a wet one with cloth and alcohol?

The disk holder should have an insert to place a magnet in, so you can really _clean_ that diskette!

I love the Blerbs channel so much Clint, it lets me see so much more cool content from you!

Wonderful video! Thanks so much for sharing. I got a kick out of seeing you so confused and trying to figure out the mystery!! 😁

Once the files disappeared I thought. "Please tell me he did a virus scan and it's not THAT kind of cleaner."

I believe that was released in a combo pack with the 'Double Your RAM' software!

wow those floppy disk holders make me feel like there is hope in this weary world

I really needed this video and your excitement today. Thank you soooooooooooo much.

I was not prepared to love this video as much as I did but here we are.

Are we sure its not loading some malicious software in the background? This was so enthralling!

In the floppy disc era, I bought a cleaning set that included two floppy discs and a bottle of cleaning solution. One disc had a DOS program similar to yours that you loaded into memory before using the other disc with the material for the cleaning solution to be applied. The program then stepped you through the process and provided the number of reps the disc needed to clean the head. After so many uses it had saved a use file on the program disc to prompt to replace the cleaning disc. I do not remember the brand name so can’t help with researching further info.

Love the floppy reading noise reminds me of loading a new game on my Amiga Like the way the cleaning mans strokes were perfectly sync'd with the disk noises

I didn’t know I needed this but now I’m ordering one. Oh God please send help.

I think the only thing that got cleaner was the disk inside the disk cleaner, by spinning it, thus making the disk drive itself dirtier.

This is so reminiscent of your review of Goat Simulator. That's the video that got me started with you way back when.

Speculation's already done with regards to it being the dry type of head cleaner, but it is pretty fun how they have the animations for the cleaning process, which is just pure Japanese oddness, so worthy of being a mini-oddware thing... :D

I know a dude who regularly interrupts his own unboxing videos with the words: "Let's have closer look at this - on the bench." :D

If not completely snake oil, it looks like maybe an attempt to use lots of rapid movements of the internals to vibrate or shake loose anything on the heads that might be interfering with read/write (like loose dust). Definitely wouldn't do anything to get rid of anything gummy or physically stuck.

Floppy discs were outdated when I was born and I have never seen anyone using them, but holy shit is this interesting. Clint, your channels are not even nostalgia fuel. For us, Gen Z, they feel like a museum.

Lol I had one of those when I had my 386 and 486 DX2 66 and it's meant to "realign" you're reading head to "check" to see if it needs physical cleaning or just a reading head realignment. It's a diagnostic tool only. Not an actual drive head cleaner. Thanks for the nostalgia trip mate 👍. The seasons are just so you can do you're anual PC "cleaning" with your house cleaning 😂. It's TEAC brand after all! 😁

Think it's supposed too have come with another disk that you swap out too which is why it takes a bit too load in, that second floppy is probably supposed too have those bristles on it or be copied over too the pc first before you run the program itself while having one of those cleaner bristle disks in there.

Using Vivaldi's 4 seasons of summer for the different seasons. How charming.

"Plop! greetings! blerbs! whatnot! yeah, lookitthis" is my new favorite intro for anything 😆

Thank you for uploading this, now I can clean the floppy drive in DosBox; it was having trouble reading PS5 games, but hopefully this will do the trick! ;)

I would be really curious to see what the drive is doing internally. It almost sounds as if the files are forcing the head to move completely from side to side, perhaps you could pull a drive and take the case off and then observe it to see if the program is forcing the read/write head to behave differently than it normally would when reading a traditional disk.

The mylar disc in the disk might have a texture to it. I've seen the same thing with VHS cleaning tapes

The thumbnail preview is an infinite loop of putting the disk in, turning it, taking it out... I was in a moment of deep thought when it caught my eye... I became mesmerised by it... I must have stared at it for ten minutes before I got snapped back to reality Holy shit

thumbs up for your archiving software habit!

Lol at Vivaldi “Four Seasons” appropriately associated with the calendar.

Part way through I was sure it was going to be a translation error and it'd just be a disk that added a reminder to clean your house every 3 months. It just keeps getting weirder!

Been waiting for this since you opened it! 😂❤

Mystery from the retro past :) Luv the Blerbs section!!!

LTO Cleanig Tapes for Tape Libraries are also only a kind of a blank Tape.

Vivaldi's 4 seasons. Classy touch.

The Teac 4x4x32 bufferless cd burner was a legend. I burned around 3000 cd-s with it and it is still operational....somewhere in the attic :-)

Feels like something the Floppotron got inspired by. "If we make the disk drive make noises, it sounds like something's getting cleaned!"

I went into this expecting it to be something like CCleaner for 1994 but I'm left more confused than informed.

I think you're supposed to swap the disk for one with the cloth thing after you run the exe

I could listen to those floppy drive sounds all day long. Also, guess I’m insane since I’m up after 4 in the morning.

The SND files have names representing the seasons in Japanese. AKI is autumn/fall (秋), FUYU is winter (冬), HARU is spring (春) and NATU is summer (夏, though written using Nihon-shiki romanisation instead of the more comon Hepburn romanisation).

The head thrashed on the abrasive section of the disk to clean. You can heat that in your video on the first pass. FWIW, Teac was a major manufacturer of both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drives. I still have several of each size in my old spare parts boxes. Finally, you commented on the spelling "disc". This was much more common for 3.5" discs while disk was more common for 5 1/4 and 8 inch discs but the two spellings were used interchangeably.

Any chance this is a clone product where they took the software from a real one but just put it on a normal floppy? Could have been a rip off back in the day.

I swear I had a copy of one of those I picked up at a PC show in either King of Prussia, PA or AC, NJ a long time ago. ...long time. So much nostalgia...

Drive cleaning, the multimedia experience! I was half expecting it to ask for a 2nd, actual brush loaded disk, that you maybe didn't have yet.

It's cross platform with PC-98,so cute to see some MAG file format going on :)

**FLOPPY HEAD CLEANER** *dramatic music blaring*

Didn't think we'd see a video about it this soon

My mom used to make me use those. Its an enema. You get to watch soothing window cleaning animations while the gutty works are being voided. Aretha Franklin invented it in 1907 for the world's fair held in the Alaska fairgrounds. It was cold that year.

Vivaldi's The four seasons! LOL

So if the software doesn't do anything useful it can at least be nice to look at and listen to. Or so the developers thought.

Dangit man, every time I see your Compaq Presario 4xx Series all-in-one I regret ever getting rid of my first computer... also neat disc cleaning video.

I remember those. they were shipped with the early teac 3.5 drives. As I recall the disk surface has a special coating and the included software loaded the drive head. I think they also used a different track each time the disk was used and needed to be replaced after a limited number of cleanings.

Wow, that's a blast from the past. Who's up for some "Secret of Monkey Island"?🤷‍♂️

That is _weird,_ dude. Definitely seems like some sort of placebo, but the fact that it came from an otherwise reputable company, just... Wow.

I had a similar type for a VHS recorder, that had what looked like a normal tape. You put it in and press play, and wait until the picture on screen because "cleaner" as the tape cleaned the head, so was pretty cool You actually get to 'see' the effects of the cleaning as it happens.

Really glad this was covered.

If I was a virus coder, I'd use such a disk to get it on your computer 😄

>placebo head cleaner disk comes in two languages >does not have a secret cherry blossoms mode for April SHAME, SHAME, SHAME

"Other Personal Computor & Word Professor" hahaha the manual is gold!

Oh wow. I had one of these back in 97 or 98 with a UK company called Linear Computers, the instructions that came with it said it should only be used occasionally to avoid wearing the drive heads. And disc is more common this side of the pond btw!

How odd! You should disassemble the exe files and see if you can tease out what it's actually doing.

Trust the Japanese to come up with software that leaves Clint speechless.. :D (I assume that the language is Japanese at any rate)

That little 3D printed disk opener rotator cleany thing is pretty cool. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I am of the generation that had hundreds of 5 1/4 and thousands of 3.5 floppies. My guess is that dirty disks became more of a problem recently with the resurgence of interest in rehabbing old computer gear. So you’ll have a lot more floppies in bad shape needing cleaning. Wasn’t as much of a problem back when the disks were all new and not being stored in an attic or garage or shed. Such a gadget might have existed back in the day, but I never saw or heard of one.

Very happy you made a video on this.

Thats the weirdest of the blerbworld. Highly doubt that has anyhing to do with TEAC... plot twist: it installs a virus while bedazzling you with vivaldi 😂

early coding days... Doing anything to get people to inject code into their machines! Imagine if that were a virus! An ancient virus, not detectable as such...lol This video literally had me laughing out loud Clint, there was a detectable nervousness in your voice! 🤣 No one should have ever doubted you checked for fir on the disc, then you break out those great cleaners!

DOS trick: use " dir /a /w " to show files will all attributes (HSRA) in a wide listing. See " dir /? " for more information, and " help dir " for too much information.