Thanks for responding. The thing is, I can't find any of the cables in the emachines pc.
I also haven't figured out how to remove, and barely can move for that matter, the DVD drive. Like I said, it's a compact computer and I'm inexperienced in all this stuff.
As for the USB adapter, it looks like a great product, but (1) There's no guarantee that I can manage to extract the data from the hard drive, so the money spent may be wasted and (2) my resources are limited in the financial department. Thanks again anyways.