Hdd test = dead laptop?

I wanted to buy a HDD from a friend at school. I was going to use it for a computer I'm going to build in 2 weeks. He told me the drive worked perfectly a month ago, the only problem was that he couldn't back-up the files on the disk. He didn't have any SATA-connections left, so I took the drive home and pluged it into my laptop. I have one 2,5" drive in my laptop, which I removed. I have a little power/data combined plug which has a really short cable in my laptop, so I used some magazines to lift the laptop up and plugged the hdd in.

When I started windows I got an error about checking the cable, and after that I got the message that there was no operating system found. I figured that since it was a drive from his dad, it might have been a second disk.

I plugged in my own drive, closed everything up and started my laptop. guess what: same message. I went into my bios and there was no fixed drive. I tried to reinstall windows but there was no drive found.

what happened?