I have a mini ACER Aspire one laptop. This morning it had a page that said windows did not load properly and start in safe mode, nothing worked. I went and called ACER and the guy told me to go buy an external Hard drive container so that I could save the data before rebooting it.
Well it was a huge job to remove it, but alas when I put it in the container and plug it in to the USB port, it shows up but when I try to open it it fails, now I did have to use a password on the laptop when I turned it on and I know my password. How do I get this to open so that I can recover my files and then I will reinstall the windows on it in the original computer. Help me please!

Hi,
I am assuming that this is correct... You now have a lop top with no drive in it and a external usb connected case with your old hard disk in it.
I think that he wanted you to purchase a second drive with an external case so that you could copy the data from your old drive to the new one. While the information you were given was good, it was not necessary to do it that way. You could have backed up your data to a DVD without the need for a new hard drive.
Now you will need to setup the BIOS to boot to your external drive and then copy all your data that you want to keep to a DVD or a new drive if you want to purchase one.

Thanks for your response.
I need a little help understanding what you are saying.
I have removed the hard drive out of my mini laptop, it is in pieces.
I have the hard drive in a external hard drive holder and it is plugged into another laptop.
Now it will not open I think because of the fact, when I started the laptop it came out of you had to put a password in, like I said before I have the password.
Are you saying I can do something with the BIOS of the computer I have it plugged into through the usb port?
The whole purpose of this is to get my data files off the hard drive before I put it back into the other laptop computer.

OK,
You have said that "it shows up", where in "my computer"?
If so, what happens when you right click on it?
If it opens another window, click "properties" then on the "tools" tab and then check now. Put a check mark in both boxes and start.

What should happen is once you connect your external harddrive it should be detected and viewable via my computer. It should display files stored on the drive. These could be copied.

If you can't see files perhaps the file system is corrupt.

press windows key+R type cmd press enter. Command prompt should come up.

Type diskmgmt look for the external drive in the new window and let us know if it says unallocated or FAT32/NTFS.

to close command prompt type exit or press the cross

- Let us know how it goes

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