Problems dumping games

[SomeGuy]

I tried cleaning the game disks from the outside as best I could, but it made no real difference. I'm not going to go as far as cutting the disks, and cleaning the disk surfaces directly, as that destroys any value the disks had. The disks heads have been cleaned multiple times, especially after the worse disks (which tend to really screech) that still only seem to show garbage for the directory listing.

Unfortunately these disks really seem completely worthless, I got the games from a large batch of C64 disks (100+) on eBay, and looks like I'm going to have to put a claim in for a refund. I'm going to stick to only new disks, and tested disks on eBay in the future.

Thanks again, for the attempts to help.

I'd be curious to know what methods you tried to clean the disks.

I've made a bit of a hobby of grabbing crufty, often poorly stored disks off of eBay just to see if I can clean and read them. Unless they were quality disks and stored inside, random disks from eBay will all too often have readability issues without any cleaning, and may even destroy the disk.

In my experiments so far, I have had mixed results with just q-tips and alcohol. And surprisingly excellent luck rinsing the disks with warm tap water (if you are careful, you can avoid getting the labels wet).