120GB External Western Digital HDD issue

I have had a 120GB External Western Digital HDD for about 3 years now. I have save a lot of information on it. All of a sudden windows is telling me that it is not formatted and it needs to be formatted. I would like to salvage the information I have saved before formatting it. Is there any utility out there that will let me back up all the information before me formatting it? I can’t even get access to it because windows tells me to format it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.