Originally Posted by Roy Cooper
sounds to me that the wnnows11 on your laptop sees the external drive has another windows on it that would require a password to run, and asks for the windows password to access it. That is a normal windows feature.

What we have to do is use a 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 browse the external drive, locate the directories with the files that you want and copy them to a folder on your laptop drive. The folder on the laptop drive should be created before doing all of this.

If that goes to plan, then you should be able to reboot the laptop on its own windows11 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.

If you are OK with that I will tell you where to get a bootable cd or usb drive from and how to use it.

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

Roy

Ok, but why wouldnt profit people know this?

Yeah I'm sure it does say hmm,bum windows 11 but this is vista, not allowing that.

So the idea is to reboot the new laptop with a boot up disk, I think I may have that in the box if new laptop. And then it will recognize everything?

I will definitely try it but couldn't be that simple could it?