Hello,

I'm not much of a tech person.  My old laptop bit the dust and I pulled the hard drive out of it.  I thought that I might be able to save some files on there and got a SATA (?) USB connector to attach the old hard drive to the new one.  Low and behold, it seems to be recognized and I can look at files and whatnot on it. 

The issue is security / ownership.  When I tell the hard drive (or even individual files) to change owner status to my new computer it starts working and eventually the new computer tells me there is an error on the hard drive and it stops changing the ownership.  Without the change I cannot view anything in my old "user" folder and I cannot transfer things to my new laptop.

It's not a huge deal... more for nostalgia and also to get some unrelated personal files back... but anything else I can try?  It was a Windows 7 operating system hard drive.

Is there a program or technique I can try?  What about buying one of those cases for a hard drive?  Right now it is just sitting loose on the desk attached to the SATA USB.

An external enclosure won't help you. Those are only useful to physically protect the drive (if you're permanently making the drive portable), or if you have a 3.5" hard drive that can't be powered over the USB bus. In your scenario the USB/SATA adapter is fine.

You can try to have Windows fix the errors on the drive. This article has instructions: https://www.alphr.com/fix-hard-drives-ch...indows-10/
In step 3 replace "c:" with whatever the old drive's actual drive letter is. It will probably take hours, so let it run uninterrupted: don't reboot, disable sleep/hibernate if you have to. Then try the ownership change again. I must warn you that there is a very slight chance that this could actually make the drive worse. It's very unlikely, but has happened to me before.