demo trouble

I'll spare you the pics of the baby dead mouse "glued" to a cassette tape from a box in my basement but let's just say that its part of the problem I've been having doing demos of new songs for the next record. Not only can I not get a silent momoent to collect my thoughts upstairs but my gear below has also been a hinderance.
First of all, I recently installed a new 60G hard drive into my 16trk hard disc recorder and have yet to work the kinks out of it. I'm probably gonna have to reinstall the operating program. I'm "seeing" what I've recorded but it's just not coming out. I'll figger that out eventually.
But when (in the interest of time) I went back to my old box, the 4 trk cassette recorder that I recorded the first record on that was inside of a toybox along with about 4 boxes of demo and song idea cassetes, I realized that I may have a problem with that thing also...mice. It looked like Momma Mouse had set up shop in there to birth some babies. Dotted with blood, piss, shit and birthin' fluids, that thing was a mess, not to mention the shape those cassettes were in. Like I said, one had a mouse stuck to it. Oh well, there go those songs for all eternity.
I gotta figger out way for me or somebody to take that thing apart and give it a thorough cleaning. I'll get those damn songs demo-ed one way or another!