[dredge]

I had almost the opposite experience!

The big difference for me was that my old Amiga 600 has a PCMCIA card slot in it. I bought a modern (and very cheap) SD card reader that fit it and copied the necessary device driver over to the Amiga via a floppy. Thankfully it was already set up to read PC disks.

After that copying files (and the entire HD image) to and from my PC was straightforward - the driver even supports VFAT long filenames. I was impressed with the whole thing.

I had a similar issue with the Amiga's floppy drives, and was surprised to discover that some software called "AMI Alignment System" seemed to get the internal drive working fine again. I'm not sure if it worked some magic or just loosened up the drive a bit; either way it let me read my old disks again. It might be worth a try.