Protected hard drive?

Not sure if this is exactly the right forum, but I'm sure it'll work. My motherboard recently died, so I built a new system. No IDE anymore, so I can't use my old system drive, so I figured I'd plug it into an old external enclosure I have to pull out some important files. When windows reads the drive, it labels it "system reserved" and shows no files. Is there any way around that? Thanks for any imput.

 

May not solve the problem but something like this might be worth a go. You could also try the testdisk software.

 

have you gone into disk management to see what partitions are showing on the old ide drive ( right click my computer / manage / disk management ) i know that most operating systems reserve a small partition it might be that that you are seeing

if thats the case or not DO NOT PARTITION OR FORMAT THE DRIVE
the next step would be to try some file / disk recovery software my first port of call would be for a freeware file recovery program and if i didn't get any joy there i would go for ARAX disk doctor which as a very good recovery tool and does exactly what it supposed to very quickly compared to some programs iv'e tried

good luck...