Trying to read hard drive "Disk is unreadable"

[nomenculture]

Okay. So I had an Imac G5 (white) running 10.4 This one crashed and I got a new iMac G5 (Silver). Since then I have removed the old hard drive. Today I connected it to a Serial ATA - USB Converter. It powers up and sounds to be working fine (hums, spinning) but my new computer says "Disk is unreadable". It gives me the option to format, but I want to recover my old files first.

Important: I also have a similar Lacie external drive that I hooked up the same way and it worked fine. I was able to take the files off of it.

My guess: I believe when the drive is connected, it is trying to start up the OS (this was the start up disc). It has that click sound like it's trying to make the chime and then spinning like it's working. Can you change the drive to a "Slave"? Or is my disc corrupted? Please help.

 

[biggd]

If your going
Pc->sat a->ata->old hdd
And you can't see it as an external drive from the pc
Then the file structure on the old hdd has collapsed and you will haft send it out to a data recovery center who will charge u $1300 to get back ur old data.

On a windows system I would run a chkdsk on the old hdd, through ur sata->ata connection
On a mac os system I don't know what the equivalent would be to fix the old hdd