Hdd not recognized by bios

hi  

well basically, im selling my old laptop that died after the charger sort of blew up about 2 years ago. the laptop wont power up even. so, i listed it on ebay, and then decided i wanted to get my old pics and music off the old hard drive so bought a usb 2.0 to sata ide cable thingy off ebay, and it came today.
with very basic instructions i managed to hookup the hdd to the sata adapter and connect it to my new laptop via usb.

so then i went to look in 'computer' (im running vista home basic) and it simply was not there.
for some reason my control panel wont open so i restarted and booted in safemode. got on to control panel and searched for hardward etc and nothing.

then i did some googling, and tried then restarting and entering boot menu, and the hdd isnt even recognized in there.

i then went on to administrative tools>disk management and tried finding it and initializing the disk there but nothing is there.

when i connect the hdd to all the cables and what not, nothing happens when i touch it, cant feel spinning or anything.

i did some more googling and tried to set the jumpers to master, but as this is a hdd from a laptop, there are no jumpers, or even pins where you put jumpers, so that was a dead end too. im assuming if the hdd is from a laptop, it would already be a master drive?
i tried moving usb hdd up in the boot list in bios settings, but as its not recognized that didnt work either.

so now what? is the hdd dead?

there is power to it from mains.

i even tried plugging it into my external hard drive cradle thingy, but still nothing.

if the disk is dead, im just gonna put it back in the laptop and list the problem on the ebay listing, but if there is someway of accessing it and someone can help, i will be a willing subject  

email me on louisebose@gmail.com, or reply here obviously! thanks in advance