Problem connecting to an external HD

My 8 years old hard drive which was running XP sp3 could not boot so I took it apart and tried to connect it to my laptop which was running Windows 7 to try to salvage whatever data is left in that drive.

However, when I connect it via the SATA to USB cable, the device could not be recognized; device manager would only recognize that cable but not the drive. What can I do? Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

 

The hard drive itself may have failed. When the power is connected, does the drive spin up? Make sure the SATA data cable and the SATA power cable are properly connected. If the hard drive is still not detected, can you attach the hard drive in the computer it came out of? If you can, does the BIOS detect the drive? If it does, try booting a linux distro like Puppy linux and see if you can transfer the files to an external drive. Sometimes these adapters cannot detect a drive even though I have had good luck using them.