Help me get the photos off of a 3.5 inch disk-without formatting?

Help me get the photos off of a 3.5 inch disk-without formatting?
We found a bunch of 3.5 inch discs in our storage unit that have old photos on them. I have a plug and play drive so I can bring them up on my Dell Studio 1737. Every time I try to open them the box pops up and says that I have to format the disc first. I know if I do this it will erase all the photos on the disc. Is there any way around this? I just want to take them off and save them on a cd or dvd.

Dell Studio 17 Laptop Details

What is the verbatim error message? It indicates that Windows does not detect or recognize the file system.

Do you have another computer you can try it on?

When I hook up the external drive it is recognized by the computer. When I put one of the 3.5 disks in it and click to open it up a box pops up saying that in order to use the disk it has to be formatted before I can use it. I am trying to do it on a laptop with vista home premium. I beleive the pics were originally saved with a laptop using windows me. We do have a desktop with xp.

For starters I would see if the same response is returned from the desktop.

I tried the same thing on the desktp and gt the same message. I tried formatting the disk but it said the disk was write protected and I still cannot open them.

Were these disks made with MS DOS or earlier Windows systems? If so then they should be recognized unless they were formatted with a utility program from the past or formatted with a non DOS system. Try and find the machine they were originally used with, or try a linux system to recover them.