Trying to turn my internal hard drive into external, need help?

Ok my desktop went out so I want to use that hard drive on my laptop. I bought a external hard drive case and installed the hard drive into the enclosue and set it as master. when I plug it into my laptop via usb it says that the ide to usb device has been installed successfully but when I try to use it, it says insert disk and it reads as a removable disk on my computer. how can I get the hard drive to work on my laptop?

 

thanks for the advice ddp but its still doing the same thing. This hard drive was the main hard drive on my desktop until my motherboard blew a capacitor so it still has all my files and the xp operating sytem on it. Is there something i'm supposed to do for it to be readable as a portable hard drive?

 

it is a western digital caviar 250 gb.

 

nobody ever had this problem?

 

yes I tried it on 2 different computers. on the first one it said installing ide to usb device is successful but when I searched for it it was no where to be found. I checked to see if it was in disk management but it didn't show up. I tried it on the second computer and it would say that it couldn't install properly. the first computer is vista and the second is xp. thanks for the response btw ddp.

 

yes it has a power cord and I tried all usb ports on both comps. this is becoming a headache lol

 

no the bios doesn't see the drive in either computer and they're both laptops, it was my desktop that blew a capacitor on the motherboard and now i'm thinking that maybe it fried my hard drive as well. I hooked up an old dvd burner to the connections of the hard drive enclosure and the computer picked it up instantly but when I hook the hard drive up nothing happens. thanks for all the help but i'm just expexting the worse now. thanks again ddp.