What is wrong with my old laptop hard drive and how do I fix it?

[Red Feather_]

I have a hard drive from an old HP Windows XP laptop and want to access some files on there, but I'm having trouble. I bought an adapter for the hard drive so I can plug it into my pc as an external hard drive, but when I try to open it or right-click it, it won't load. One time I had to restart my pc after trying to open the drive. I don't think it's encrypted, and I just can't figure out what's wrong with it.

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[Tony D]

It it's old, it may be an IDE drive. They may have to be configured as a Master to open it. But then you did say you can 'see it'. So it's probably configured right or it's a SATA drive.
Either way, it's old. It may have bad sectors. Run a disk check on it.
Find the drive letter associated with the drive.
From a command prompt, type in chkdsk X: /r with X being the drive letter. It may take a few hours.