We had our HP laptop motherboard die (at least that's what HP told us the problem was). We pulled the hard drive out and bought a different laptop. We also bought a cable that plugs into the old HP hard drive and then into the USB port of the new machine. I can see the hard drive of the HP under "my computer" when I plug it into the new machine. It is listed as drive "F."

It shows that a good chunk of the F drive is full (1.94 GB free of 11.7 GB). However, when I click on this drive, labeled HP_Recovery (F:), it shows only one folder, labeled recovery. This folder, when clicked on, says that it is empty. I had a number of folders on my old HP with some Word files I want to copy.

Is there any way to find these files? The HP only crashed a few months ago at most so this isn't an old drive.

Your laptop was OEM (with HP as the Original Equipment Manufacturer). Most of these systems come with a hidden recovery partition you can use to get back to the factory default in an emergency. It sounds like your new laptop is seeing the recovery partition but not the OS partition with all your data. There can be several reasons for this but the most likely is your new laptops hard drive is formatted in a different file system than the old one and for some reason the recovery partition is the same (Fat32 and Fat32 or Ntfs and Ntfs). An NTFS file system can see FAT32 (NTFS was created after FAT32 so its aware, but FAT32 was created before NTFS existed so it cannot identify it, a FAT32 partition cannot see NTFS. There are ways to convert a drive to NTFS if that's the case but there are also free boot disks that run linux that can see both and would allow you to copy your files from one drive to the other that way. If you get your data that way you can then completely format the old drive into the new drives file system and use it as a back up external drive. The old drive is probably marked somewhere with its capacity, if it says its an 80gig drive and all you see is 1.94 left of 11.7 gig, then you know something is missing.

You should be able to drag and drop files from the old hard drive to your new laptop. Or copy and paste. Can you open files from the old hard drive?