Getting files off a dead HDRW720's Hard Disk

Anyone try to recover the files from a Philips HDRW720 HDD? Mine died yesterday and, after sleeping on it, I consigned it to the bin but not before gutting it partly with the intention of trying to recover the remaining programs left on it (if that's possible of course) but also with the idea of using the 80GB drive in a PC.
I've tried it in both a Win98 and an XP machine. The Win98 recognised it at boot-up but no sign once into Windows - I did have a cursory glance around the bios settings but it seemed happy with what it had found. The XP machine again recognised it at boot-up but failed to get any further due to it wanting to boot to it despite it being set as a slave (tried it on both IDE channnels - same result) again the BIOS appears ok but this maybe due to my unusual IDE/SATA boot arrangement (the boot sector is on the IDE drive and the OS is on the SATA - don't ask!). I thought that before I go pulling everyting apart from my main machine I'd ask to see if anyone has any clue if I'm just wasting my time and would recommend that I should simply FDISK it).
Many thanks in anticipation

 

Hi

It's probably some file system that might be readable under Linux, even then you may not be able to do anything with the information from the disc without specialised software.

You will not be able to see anything with a Windows PC as it will not be formatted with FAT or NTFS.

Regards

Phil