SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter to access files on old drive

[Pittmann]

My mother board fried and I purchased a new computer.  I pulled the SATA hard drive from the old computer and purchased a SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter to access the files. Once the drive loaded and the adapter was ready to use, it cam up as Drive D.  When I tried access drive D, I received the message, below, about the old drive.  At that point, I did not go any further with trying to access the old drive for fear that if I did it was going to format or recover or do something undesirable to my new computer. I just want to open the old hard drive up as a folder to extract files off there. Please advise.

Recovery Partition
Warning!

This area of your hard drive
(or partition) contains files used
for your PC Recovery.

Do not delete or alter these files.

Any change to this partition could
prevent any recovery later.

[Salmon Trout]

If you are sure that is on the old drive, it sounds like your old (dead) computer's recovery partition. This is now useless, since the rest of that computer has died and gone to heaven. However, if the recovery partition is the only thing that comes up as a drive letter, then you have a big problem because there should be another much bigger partition that contained your data. This may have died too, I guess. But how are you "accessing" this drive? Is it showing up as a drive letter in Windows? Only one or more than one? What did you do that made this warning show?