> Floppies were always on the verge of dying all the time, even in the 80s and 90s

THIS!

Gen-X here..... 3.5" Floppies were notoriously unreliable, even good quality branded discs had a fairly high failure rate. Were were always careful to make multiple backups of anything important stored to floppy. When CD-Rs came along they were a godsend.

Yes, a different drive might help OP as sometimes the alignment was slightly off between floppy drives (meaning data recorded on one would not read very well on another and vice versa). Although frankly, I'm not in the least surprised a 30 year old disc has gone titsup.

OP would be better to grab a copy of this data from archive.org or elsewhere if he can.