Windows 7: Not displaying usb hard drive

My computers motherboard fried a few weeks ago, so I fished out an old laptop and restored the OS to factory settings with a restore disk I created. My goal was to just use this laptop until I repaired my new one. (had to clean install windows seven because a prior failure which led me to getting a new one in the first place) After sucessfull reinstalation of windows on my old one, I popped out my hard drive on my new laptop, placed it in a portable usb case and plugged it into my ,now working one. My old laptop "recognised" the drive but will not display it in the computer browser window. it displays it in device manager with no errors, but i just cannot access the drive. I noticed in the disk management window, it is also displayed but does not recognize any file system for the drive (what should be a NTFS file system). I need to access some files on this HD and do not want to mess with the partition or file system on this drive because I want to keep this drive "in tact" for when I get a new motherboard for my new computer. How do i go about accessing this drive from my USB without risk of loosing the "structially fine" data already on it?

Try accessing your hard drive with a live Linux CD/pendrive.

Peppermint3 - Create Live CD/DVD/USB To Use For Emergency Backup

or

Lucid Puppy way to recover files from a non-bootable computer

whichever you may prefer.

Thanks but my old laptop does not allow me to boot from USB so that option is not going to work. This probably doesn't make a difference, but the hard drive from my new laptop has a SATA connection and my old laptop's hard drive has an IDE connection. The "new" hard drive is connected through a external USB SATA hard drive case anyway, so I cant see that being the problem, however my old laptop also will not recognize the original hard drive that came with the case either. I do have a second external hard drive which has a IDE connection and mt laptop "sees" that one just fine.
Any additional thoughts???