hi brownthumbia,
Are you asking about 3.5 in floppies or a camera storage card? If it's a camera card, you should be able to view it's contents on the camera. You do need to format it to be able to download future pictures to the computer. For a normal 3.5 in floppy, if Windows tells you it's not formatted, it will not be able to read it until it is.

If I totally misunderstood, I apologize and ask for clarification ;-)

Pam

hi pkponder. Thanks for your reply and no, I don't think you misunderstood. Oh goodness, now I really am confused. The disks I am using are the ones I take the pictures with the camera. The disk says they are formatted but as I said when I put it in the computer they say it isn't. I have some that I can view but I'm sure I just took the pictures, put them in the computer and viewed the pictures. I even sent some of the pics to relatives. Just can't figure out why some work and some don't.
To tell you the truth I did not know there was a difference between the two. (I need to take a class!! LOL) Thanks again for your help. I sure need all the help I can get, BT

Some Sony digital cameras do use regular 3 1/4 in. floppies.
I just copied this from the technical report on a sony digital camera:
"# Stores images on floppy discs
# Discs can be read by virtually all Macs and PCs with floppy drives."
Since the claim is that the disks can be read from the floppy drive of most computers they must be formatted the same. I don't understand how they could be read by both PC and Mac computers but don't know anything about Macs at all.
I think that since the pc says the disk isn't formatted that either it hasn't been formatted or has been formatted in a form that the pc can't recognize.
I can't explain how different disks from the same package would behave differently. Maybe some were preformatted and some weren't.
Unless you can try it in another computer you may as well go ahead and format it.

Wish I still had my old Sony floppy camera.
It was recommended to format the floopy in the camera and to keep in mind that those floppys do wear out after not too many re-uses in that camera.
Somehow that camera drive was pretty hard on floppies, probably from bumping or twisting it around when it was writing to disk.

I have a stack of about 50 floppies from my old Sony which I am in the process of putting on my hard drive (the pictures, not the floppies. LOL) I'm using Picasa to do it. By the way, the person who now has that camera is still using it. I even bought an adaptor to allow the use of the memory stick, but it didn't last long. But the new media cards are so much easier to use because you don't have to keep changing them. When I want to copy some pictures, I just slip the SD card out of my camera and into the built-in reader on my computer.

Brownthumbia -- you might need to load the camera software onto your computer.