Just as a quick update, I have dug out the disks but cannot get anything to read at the moment. I do suspect however that this is not down to the disks but down the my knackered old 3.5 drive that is creaking away desperately..
I'm going to go to the local parts supplier this weekend to get a new one so hopefully things will go a lot better when I drag that out.
I think I will end up putting the data on a public section of my ftp site as I also have a lot of source code for other old systems to upload as well.