A good cleaning will do wonders for the old floppy drive. I did the swap you are working on a few years ago. I swapped in a 1.44 drive out of a dead Classic. Between the dust build up and old grease the drive barely functioned. I swabbed and blew out lots of gunk using compressed air and alcohol with Qtips. Then I oiled the mechanism with G96. A product I had always used to clean and lube firearms. The drive functioned smartly with none of the drag and whining that it did before the clean up. The drive has worked perfect since the cleanup, about 3 years ago.