Sometimes when you place a disk in drive that is old and degraded it will leave a residue on the drive head and make it inoperable. The only way to get the drive working again is to clean it with a proprietary disk style head cleaner. Happens to me all the time when checking old disks. The tell tail sign often is a lot of disk activity and nothing happening on the screen. Sadly the computer just hangs there no matter how many disks you put in. Get a disk head cleaner off Ebay and keep it by the computer. You should avoid using the drive till its cleaned as you could damage good disks. The trick is to keep the computer serviced and use frequently. Do not move around too much and avoid dusty environments.
