Help please, I need to get files from a hard drive

Hi, I just got my new Macbook. I needed a new computer because my Dell gave me a BSOD I could not recover from. I cannot boot up the old hard drive at all, I have a cable that plugs to the hard drive and converts it to usb. The drive is a WD 80 GB, I try to plug it in to the Mac and it says cannot read from the drive. The drive was used on a windows xp pro setup and was NTFS format. I have alot of mpeg's and mp3's on this drive, does anyone have any suggestions for recovering the data? Any help is greatly appreciated and will be tried. Thanks

what kind of cable did you try? and is this a 3.5" disk or a 2.5"?

you may want to try a proper enclosure or checking to see if a windows computer can read it.

the format, NTFS, shouldn't matter as OS X can read it, but would not be able to write to it or modify/delete files. which should be fine for your purposes of recovering files.
if you can get it to work, you could simply reformat it and use it as an external. of course your BSOD could have been caused by the HD as well...

Sorry, forgot to mention, it's an ide to usb cable, it came with a wall plug in that plugs into the hard drive as well. It is a 3.5" drive. I have tried to check this drive with windows, and cant seem to access any of the files on it. Don't know if it's because it was a boot drive and setup with drive letter c and the other machine also had a boot drive with c drive. Thanks

If your Mac says that the disk is unreadable, it's probably not going to work. You can try putting the drive in the freezer (I'm not kidding) for about 20-30 mins and see if it's readable then. If not, you're probably out of luck.

I will try that. Thank you