[analogsonar]

So I bought an enclosure for the hard drive from my old broken laptop and put it in an enclosure today and plugged it in, the hard drive is spinning and the enclosure shows an orange light. It came from a laptop that was using vista (it had a password, if it matters) and I am trying to plug it into a comptuter that uses windows 7 (used to xp). It does not recognize the drive at all, just seems to be powering it. great appreciation for your assistance.

 

[krmathis]

Perhaps it simply is not provided enough power?
I have an external 2.5" HDD which mounts fine on my current laptop, while on my previous laptop it spins up but I am not able to access it. It did come with a cable with two USB plugs in one end that solve this though.

 

[Punnisher]

USB ports are specified to supply 5v at a minimum of 500ma. Your average 5400 rpm laptop drive will draw around 700ma.

Of course, the max rating for certain usb implementations might very well be higher than 500ma, and the rating on the HDD may be a high estimate. This is why my external worked on all my computers with one USB port. Though, I would not recommend it for obvious reasons.