Old hard drive for external hard drive on new laptop

[BigDumy]

Hello everyone, I was wondering if you could help me? I had a HP Pavilion laptop computer that the screen died on me and I removed the hard drive. I bought a new HP G60-445DX notebook PC and  bought a  Gigaware hard drive enclosure so I could hook up my old hard drive to my new laptop and remove the files that I want (pictures mostly).  When I hook up the drive to my laptop I hear the hard drive spinning and I get a message on my toolbar (Safely Remove Hardware) so I know the computer knows that there is something connected but when I go to "MY COMPUTER" the drive does not show up.  I can see the hard drive when I go into Device Manager... it's listed as ST910082 8A USB Device. When I double click on it it says that "This device is working Properly" . The driver is the latest driver (6.06.6002.18005). I've uninstalled the driver and reinstalled it and still nothing.  My new computer is running VISTA and the old hard drive was running XP if that matters. Now I've tried to reinstall the hard drive in my old  laptop and hook that laptop up to an old desktop screen and kept getting the message "PXE-E61 Media Test Failure" so I dont think the drive is being recognized there either? The original problem with my old laptop was just that the screen was shot.......then I removed the hard drive........I didn't know at the  time that all I had to do was hook up my laptop to another screen and I probably could have gotten my files off of it that way(hence the name BigDumy). I can hear the hard drive in the enclosure spinning when it is plugged into my new laptop I just can't do anything with it. Any help would be appreciated. If there is any other information that you need just let me know. I saw this very same problem on another forum somewhere but there wasn't a solution. Thanks in advance for any help.

[BigDumy]

I looked in Disk Management and the external hard drive is there but it doesn't have a letter .  Layout: Simple, Type: Basic, under file systems it's blank and under status: Healthy (Active, Primary Partition).  If I right click on it all the choices are greyed out and the only ones I'm able to click on are  VOLUME and HELP.

[lectrocrew]

I looked in Disk Management and the external hard drive is there but it doesn't have a letter .  Layout: Simple, Type: Basic, under file systems it's blank and under status: Healthy (Active, Primary Partition).  If I right click on it all the choices are greyed out and the only ones I'm able to click on are  VOLUME and HELP.

I wouldn't do anything to it in Disk Management until you get the files of of it (safely). And I'm thinking the safest way is to re-install the drive in the original slot in the laptop (now hooked to an external monitor) and then save those files to CD/DVD/external hard drive ect.
 Would that help?

[BigDumy]

Hello Lectrocrew and thanks for the response. I tried reinstalling the drive in my old laptop and then hooking the laptop up to an old desktop monitor and when I did I would get a screen that said "PXE-E61 Media Test Failure-Check Cable".  I checked the cables for connections and they look good. Someone told me to go into BIOS and I was able to get in there but I couldn't do anything. It's like the laptop is not seeing my hard drive there either. When my computer first died the screen went a cool shade of purple and then nothing so I figured it was just my screen. I can hear the hard drive spinning and it's not loud or it doesn't seem damaged (as far as I can tell).  On the pins on the hard drive you can set it up for Master, Slave and something else (GS?), the something else is how I have the pins set.