Backup !

[tone007]

I've had luck wetting the media inside the floppy with isopropyl alcohol and either spinning it by hand for a bit or running it in the drive, of course it doesn't always work but it could be worth a shot.  Sometimes if you look a the disk through the window you can see where the problem is and clean it with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab.

As for downloading it and rewriting the floppy, as a last resort and after determining the disk is still usable (good luck there) I cant imagine anything wrong with that.

[tone007]

Can anyone explain how cleaning a disk surface would actually work (I suppose if there was actually enough dirt on there to cause the head not to be able to get near the disk surface to read the data)?

The disks can get dirty/moldy/whatever, if you look at the surface you can see crap there sometimes.  Obviously cleaning the disk gently could remedy reads failed due to crap on the disk, and has worked for me on a couple of occasions.  Success rate is probably low, but I figure if the disk is screwed up anyway, it's worth a shot.

[tone007]

I've used the floppy head cleaner solution.