On the disk: If you turn the floppy disk manually via the silver hub underneath, does it turn all the way around?

Have you tried a USB floppy drive on a modern PC to see if the disk can be read, or another modern disk drive?

Do not mess with the alignment. It is highly unlikely a dirty disk would cause misalignment.

If you put a new fresh disk, does the drive scratch it and leave rings on it? This would be a good indicator that your drive heads are either still dirty, or they lost their smooth finish and now they scratch disks themselves.

Cleaning the heads isn't very easy. Especially head 1 (the upper one) because you don't have good control to get the cotton swab to wipe it well. You could disassemble them too, but that brings us again to realignment.. IMO factory alignment is too valuable to lose if you're not sure it became really off.

What error DOS says when you try reading a disk with the drive? General reading error or drive not ready?

fix_metal wrote on 2025-12-04, 21:56:

I bought some old big box game (Indiana Jones and the fate of atlantis), and while checking if the disks were healthy, one of them made weird noises

This is why it's a good idea to inspect all the floppies you get, rotating them by hand. Time consuming and PITA with multiple floppies but can save you from such problems if you spot signs of surface damage. Doesn't always help though, some might look OK-ish but start shedding in the drive anyway.

It's odd that you've cleaned the drive and it still won't read anything. Either there is still some residue fouling the heads or possibly the head suspension springs got damaged - or even the head got ripped off completly. It would be good to figure this out first because in most cases such damage can't be repaired, unless you swap parts from a donor drive. Not much point in doing that for standard 3.5" drives, it's cheaper to replace them whole. I could perhaps help you but first I'd have to know these drives can be fixed. Major repairs are just not worth the shipping cost and time. Make some photos, maybe? And we can take it from there. Both of the drives (obviously remove the covers so the heads can be seen) and try to find the problem with the floppy that killed the drive. If there is any, perhaps the floppy is not the cause after all.

For the photos just make sure they are in focus and decent resolution, if nothing is obvious I'll suggest more angles and/or what parts to try and zoom in.