external harddrive anything special to do

I took a HHD out of an old laptop and bought a case and it is now plugged in to my laptop. I can hear the drive running and shows up as the D:drive. Is there anything special I need to do to access all of the files? There are many pictures and files I really need to get at, but, so far haven''t been able to.

Likely to be a permissions issue. Can you see anything on the drive at all?

You might find this convenient:
Add Take Ownership to Context Menu in Windows 10

Thank you for your reply. I will work on that today and check out the link. Here is what shows up when I click on the D: Drive.

Any HDD have a spinning disk and an arm moving very close to the surface.
Once you connect to the laptop, don't move it. Don't even touch it.

Take a screenshot while in Disk Management and post it.

I pulled a 250GB hard drive from an old laptop and put it into an external enclosure. I connected it to my laptop.
Here is a screenshot in Disk Management taken on my laptop. This 250GB hard drive shows up as Disk 2 or G:.

Here you go, Sir!

Can you find a folder similar to
D:\Users\--- your user profile folder ---\Pictures
?
Is that what you can't access? And if so, does 'take ownership' (see above) help?

I went to D: and clicked on users, then Administrator. It said I did not have Permission. I fixed that and now I can access all the files on that HHD! It takes a few clicks to get there. I have to click on the Drive, then click on Users, then Jayhawk714 then Pictures.
Thank you sooooo much. Now I can get back to burning wood!!! I never thought of doing what you said. So happy you took the time to help.


Duane

Drive 1 has system files that can cause problems as it is still a boot able drive.
After you have copied all your files from the D: drive and if you're not planing to use it as a boot able drive, you should clean all the disk and make only one partition for data.

To clean the drive and make only one partition for data, open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the external drive number)
select disk n (replace n by the external drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
create part primary
select part 1
format fs=ntfs quick
assign
exit (to exit diskpart)