[hmstx]

Go for it, you might be surprised! In the last 6 years or so, I decided to poke at my childhood Amiga 500 again when visiting family (which is where it still lives) and I wasn't sure how many of the errors I saw came from a dead disk drive or fading floppies. Last week, enraged with disk/drive issues, I rushed a poor man's drive cleaning with 90 proof alcohol on the heads (99.9 IPA much preferred), and WD40/90 proof in the disk presence switch (again, proper contact cleaner and IPA much preferred). Most disks behaved well after that - original software or user written, a few of my own disks had errors, and a couple sound like they need gluing back to the center spindle. These are all disks from 90-98 and I was able to move data back and forth through the serial cables I'd finally acquired for that purpose.

This machine now has more problems with flaky IC connections and wonky caps than disks. Given the visual glitches in some of my old DeluxePaint files viewed on the actual machine, I'm surprised the circuits didn't mess up any of the transfers, because I didn't get the glitches in the emulator afterwards..