External HDD “Disk Not Formatted”

I have a hdd taken from a dead laptop. I am trying to reover the data from the hard drive by attaching a USB to IDE cable. When attached to my desktop computer, it sees the laptop’s hard drive in “My Computer” but when I try to explore the drive I get an error box “Disk Not formatted” “Do you want to formatt?” Of course I click NO.

Why does it say not formatted? It shows up in Disk Management, but with no info in the File System Column, status is healthy.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.