Rotting 5.25 floppies

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

I fired up my IIGS last night after probably its longest hiatus ever
(about 3 years I'd guess). The 3.5 inch was a bit frosty - after I put
in Silpheed, the eject button wasn't working. It didn't even work when
I paper clipped it. Then suddenly the disk ejected after about 30
seconds. After that the eject button worked fine. Maybe the contact
needed the scraping it got by me pressing it a bunch?

Anyway... the main problem I face isn't with the 3.5s, it's with the
5.25s. I've got 4 boxes worth of them going back to 1980, and even a
few years ago, roughly 1 in 5, when booted, would immediately screw
the 5.25 drive, presumably because they've become rust or mould or
introduced some other kind of crud to the drive. I do have a cleaning
disk but it just doesn't seem to work too well. I mean you're lucky if
the drive is cleaned in one pass. Sometimes it would take 3 or 4. And
then there was the time the drive never came back, and I had to go buy
a new one on ebay.

Last night, after I played some Savage Island Part I, I put in a
different 5.25, and it did the screwing my drive routine.

This is pretty exasperating. I have a few questions about this whole
dirty 5.25 matter -

1. How prevalent is this? Are all 5.25s getting like this due to age,
or is it just that a lot of them haven't been touched for a decade,
even if they've been well stored?

2. Is there any advantage in opening the 5.25 drive up and cleaning it
by hand, over using a cleaning diskette and isopropyl? I've never done
this before, but there seem to be a bunch of how-to's around and if it
can somehow restore a 5.25 that a cleaning disk can't save anymore,
I'm willing to try it.

Mostly it seems too precarious to go playing my 5.25 games. I think I
am just going to have to limit myself to getting all my important data
off 5.25s (assuming they aren't rotted, too) and only after that's
done can I risk going around putting in any old disk I'd like.
- Wade