SYSTEM partition blank

My friend's computer has a hardware fault, and so I removed the drive to copy things off of it. I put it in an external enclosure, and it has 3 partitions. 1 is a HP tools one, another is a recovery partition, and the third is the main one named SYSTEM. It seems to be blank however, including hidden files, yet it says it's about 50% full. How can I get them to show up?

Run chkdsk /r against it, see if that fixes it. May be a corrupted file system.

Can't you open the partition and have a look what's inside ?

Those partitions are hidden and you either need a third party partition manager or use Diskpart to put a drive letter on the partition and then use the dir /a command to show the files in some directories.

You don't normally need to look in the System partition. Does it say EFI in the description?

No big deal to assign a drive letter. But the system partition always shows as zero.