Broken floppy disks

Hi guys... I have a truly huge number of old 3.5" HD floppy disks which no longer work. Attempting to format them in DOS returns the largely unhelpful "Invalid media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable" error message. I'm guessing it's because these disks are old (pushing on for 20 years in some cases, and I'm fairly sure they're *all* over 10 years), and they've degraded over time, or the magnetic signals have become disorientated, or some such technical explanation.... However, the result is, they're so much plastic scrap at the moment. Is there any device/program/machine I can use to restore these floppys back to working order? I'm not overly bothered about keeping the data that's on many of them (although if there IS a way to preserve it, that'd be great), but they do still sometimes come in useful, and it'd be a shame to bin so many of them. Cheers! Ade. PS: Most of my old 5.25" disks, despite being up to 30 years old, are all working fine. Similarly, most of my old Sinclair microdrive cassettes, which are >20 years old, are also fine - at least, the ones where the little foam pad hasn't perished are. Similarly, many of the compact cassettes I have for various old 20+ year old home computers still work.... are 3.5" 1.44MB floppies just inherently useless? No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.484 / Virus Database: 269.12.0/960 - Release Date: 18/08/2007 15:48