I have disassembled and dedusted the disk drive and still get this error on an Commodore 64. Is it probable that the floppy diskettes are simply demagnetized by now? I am trying to recover some of dad's old essays and poems.

Edit: the error channel says READ ERROR

Edit2: the read head is not rusted. In fact, it looks like new. 😅 Tried both LOAD"*",8 and LOAD"$",8 on another ten or so disks, with the same file not found error.