Regardless of the windows version on your laptop or PC, it sounds to me that your laptop or PC sees that the old external drive has another windows installed on it that would have required a password to run in a system, and asks for that windows password to access it. That is a normal windows security feature.

What we have to do is use a special cd or usb boot disk to start your laptop.
you should then be able to see your laptop drive and your external drives as just data drives.

then you can browse the external drive, locate the directories with the files that you want and copy the files to a folder on your laptop or PC drive.
The folder on the laptop or PC drive should be created before doing all of this and should have a unique name.

This is so that the files that you recover to your laptop or PC are easy to locate, simply by doing a search of the laptop or PC drive, using the unique folder name that you created, into which you copied the recovered files..

If that goes to plan, then you should be able to reboot the laptop on its own windows and hopefully the files would be there.

Once all the files that you want are safe and sound on your laptop, you can keep the external drive for backup as is, or format it and send the files back to the drive.

this for me would be my first method to try, but I have others if this did not work.

Roy

Last edited by Roy Cooper; 04/03/25 01:44 AM.
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