Dud floppies?

[Kitch]

I have a box of about 500 original magazine cover disks that came with one of the A1200's I bought. The problem is nearly all the floppies I have tried make a nasty squeaking sound when I put them in the disk drive. After trying a couple of these disks I have to run a head cleaning floppy so that the drive will work again. Of the 50 or so I've tried only about 2 floppies worked ok.
Are all these disks beyond help? Any idea what may have done this to the entire box?
Thanks, Andrew

[sundown]

Floppies can go bad with improper storage, but it sounds like a bad floppy drive to me. I had this happen on my A4000T with a HD floppy drive, very few floppies tested good. Not long after, the floppy started to make a squeaking noise on bootup & I had to replace it. "Bad" floppies were good again.

[Kitch]

I have two external drives plus the internal and they all don't like the floppies out of the box of 500. If I use any floppies from my own collection they all run fine.
Must have been improper storage in the past. What a waste.
One of the floppies had a utility on it that I really wanted, so I carefully sprayed some WD40 on to the center section and after a couple of tries it worked, so I then made a copy. Tried it on another floppy but it didn't work so I gave up because I didn't think the WD40 was the best thing for the floppy or the drive.
Andrew

[melott]

I have a simular situation ...
I have a box of about 500 used floppy disks.
I went through them and saved what files I wanted
(that still worked) to my Storage Harddrive and
formatted the disks.
Now for some reason they seem to take a good format
but after setting for a couple days they develope
errors. I'm sure its not my floppy drives (4 of them).
So now if a disk has read errors I just pitch it :-)