Solved Shorted out hard drive?

[Slammer]

I have been trying to use an old IDE internal HD as an external one using a borrowed IDE to USB adapter with power supply. I'm not an expert on hardware, and the instructions included were far from thorough. I carefully removed it from the old computer (it kept giving the blue screen of death and it's too old for me to bother trying to fix it) and carefully connected it to the adapter and power supply and got it spinning up. When I plugged the USB end into my computer, it showed that it installed the drivers successfully and was ready to use. But I couldn't find it anywhere in My Computer. I checked the instruction paper and it only had instructions for OSs up to XP. So I unplugged it and reattached it a couple times to see if that would get it working. After a couple times doing this (I can't remember in what order I unplugged things) the HD stopped spinning up when I plugged it in to the power supply. I can still feel it trying to (it gives a little bzz about every second and I can feel it "trying" to move by the way it shakes a little bit; I'm not sure how to explain it except that it feels like it's starting to spin and then stops just as quickly, and repeats consistently every second-ish) Listening closely I can hear it making other noises as well, like the clicking sound on older systems you hear when the HD is really busy.

I know static could be a big problem, but don't know how to diagnose what all this means, and can't find a similar situation online. It wouldn't be a huge problem if it was totally fried or something, but I'd really like to know what to do and try to get it working again. I was going to put it back in the original computer and see if I could get it to work there, but the power cable has gone missing and I don't know when I'll be able to find it/steal one from another computer laying around my house. Any ideas from someone who knows anything about hardware would be appreciated.

Also, if you happen to notice my other threads about the new hard drive I'm getting, this adapter I'm using now isn't mine. I'm just borrowing it to get a feel for this kind of stuff. I still need help in those other threads

 

[Slammer]

Nevermind, I hooked it directly up to the power cable in the old computer and that powered it fine, so it's an issue with the power adapter. Unfortunately, the actual IDE to USB adapter doesn't work either. Either the driver for it is faulty, or the cable itself is. It shows that it's installing the drivers, and that it installed successfully, but plugging it into the hard drive does nothing. It doesn't show up as a storage device. And of course it came from china, so no brand or any way of getting support for it. And the net doesn't have any kind of "generic" driver for it, so I've given up on it. I even tried it on an XP machine and got the same (lack of) results.

 

[ilikefree]

Try plugging it in and then reboot top see if it shows after.

 

[Slammer]

I'll try that idea out when I get some more time to mess with it. For now I'll just assume it's broken and mark it as solved, but I'll post if that helped when i get around to it. Thanks for the suggestion.