Did you try to see if the CD works with the current version? It might take an afternoon's work, but it is possible, as long as you have plain Mathematica notebooks. If the stuff was encrypted, forget it.
I have done this with some older notebooks, and it is tedious. The main versions that broke a lot of stuff are versions 3.0 and 6, and there was a tool in mathematic to update older versions. There is also documentation somewhere on the Wolfram site about what to do.