There are many hard drive enclosures out there ... but determine what cable you need for your hard drive mechanism - to - hard drive enclosure ... connection ... and then get such an enclosure.
Remove your computer’s hard drive from the computer, and install the hard drive into the enclosure that you bought.
The hard drive enclosure will most likely have a USB or Firewire connection for connecting to some computer.
Find somebody whom you trust, and they use the Mac -— any Mac OS from 10.4 “Tiger” thru 10.8 “Mountain Lion” will do.
Connect your hard drive enclosure to that Mac.
Your hard drive will mount and a generic icon (most likely) will display in the Finder window for the Mac’s Desktop.
Ask your friend to create a new folder on the Mac’s Desktop.
Copy the contents of your hard drive to that folder.
Make a DVD of the contents of that folder.
Repeat for addition old hard drives that you might have around.
VERY easy to get the data off of a Windows OS based machine hard drive, when using the Mac.
Good grief.Please don’t take this too personal.
Please pay attention to what the original poster wrote.
He has personal data on an old computer running DOS,not any version of Windows.Worse,his old monitor (display screen) is bad and it is also a really non-standard one.
He is using a different and much newer computer to post here.
The apparent goal is recovery of data of personal value,not re-use of a tiny old hard drive.
Telling him to run a hard drive erasing program that won’t even begin to load on an old DOS computer is a sign somebody didn’t read the original question.
The old computer’s hard drive is not compatible with any of the external hard drive enclosures sold now. Not IDE,.not PATA or SATA or USB.
All these Windows tips are not relevant until he gets the data off the old drive and onto a newer one.
This thread is not unique;in every computer forum I see lots of people posting answers who ASSUME the person asking for help must be using the latest version of Windows ,regardless of all the contrary info posted in the question.