Hard Drive file recovery problem

I have a Windows 8 laptop which will not start up. I have made a USB recovery drive but they does not work either. Decided to seek a warranty repair/replacement of machine so need to back up hard disk files.

When I connect the hard drive to my desktop with a SATA/USB converter the drive shows up in 'My Computer' after a couple of minutes but it does not show total capacity or available drive space. The desktop is obviously trying to transfer the drive contents (the task bar at the top of the window shows a green line to indicate progress of loading of data which gets about 98% across and then stops).

This process then jams up my desktop and stops any other process from working. I tried to scan the external drive with my AVG but I got 'program not responding'.

There is no issue with my SATA/USB converter because I use it all the time with an old hard drive from my last desktop.

If it is relevant the laptop hard drive is a Toshiba MQ01ABD100

Any thoughts. You will have guessed from the post that I am not a 'techie' so please spoon feed your advice!!

There is no issue with my SATA/USB converter because I use it all the time with an old hard drive from my last desktop.

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Your converter might be incompatible with the newer HD even though it's working with the old HD's. It happened to me when I use an old converter to read my 1.5 TB HD and it only shows 700MB. I got a new one that would support USB3 up to 4TB and backward compatible with USB2 then everything is working as it should.

here's what I bought: Amazon.com: Anker® USB 3.0 to SATA 3ft Converter Adapter Cable for 2.5 inch/3.5 inch Hard Drive Disk HDD and SSD, Power Adapter included: Electronics