Problems Moving HDD (And Data On It) to Windows 10 From Older Win Sys

I have an old Windows 98 system that I have had around for years and have been preparing to move anything of importance from it to a Windows 10 system in preparation for discarding the Win 98 system. I rarely use it anymore and no longer back up files on it but still would like to move the remaining files on it to a Windows 10 system if possible.

I’m not sure how healthy the HDD on it is however. There is only one HDD on it and the last time I attempted to boot from it, the system said that it could not find a HDD to boot from. I checked and made sure that the drive was spinning and it was spinning normally. I then tried to boot from a CDROM based WIN 98 system and again, the BIOS couldn’t find a boot drive, even after I changed the boot sequence.

Suspecting a possibly bad HDD but not sure whether I had a bad HDD or a bad WIN 98 CPU, I moved the entire IDE HDD to a Windows 10 system, connected it via an IDE/SATA adapter and powered it up as a secondary drive in the Windows 10 system. This time, the BIOS on the Windows 10 system found the old IDE HDD and Disk Management on the Windows 10 system found the drive as well and displayed its capacity.

What DM on the WIN 10 system will NOT let me do however is make the old WIN98 HDD fully useable under the new WIN 10 system. Instead, it displays a message saying that the IDE drive needs to be INITIALIZED under the WIN 10 system which I cannot do of course since it would destroy the data on the drive.

Is there a way for me to recover the data from this HDD under WIN 10? It is not critical data and as such is not backed up. Still, I would like to recover as much of it as possible. As near as I can tell, I should be able to move that old HDD drive into a WIN10 system and read the data from it if the drive is intact. Is that true? If so, do I have a bad HDD and if I do, would rebuilding the MBR on it possibly help?

Thanks for any help.