Q: I pulled this internal harddrive off my old pc. It is badly infected. I have hooked up to my laptop through an ide to usb cable. I have not searched through the drive as of yet. Is there any software that will help me extract these files without getting my current system infected?
A: Yes, I would put it back into the old pc and use a bootable cd-based OS running linux that will support many methods to recover your data, and since it is linux based it will be completely immune to whatever has infected your windows based os hard drive. Here is a great guide to get things going Computer First Aid Using Knoppix http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/ it describes many methods like cd / dvd backup, usb keychain/hdd, copy to network drive, etc. cheers