HDD recognition issues

Yes. Funfun.
OK, so like two years ago my laptop died and I just recently got around to buying a 2.5" 44-pin to 3.5" 40-pin adapter.
So I pop open the case and hook it up to the primary slave cable and boot up the comp and go into BIOS to make sure everything works fine. To my dismay, whenever I have my laptop harddrive hooked up, NEITHER of the harddrives are recognized by my computer at all.
The only thing I could possibly think of that would cause this is that the laptop was running XP, so the drive is formatted in NTFS, but this ME comp should at least be able to recognize it (and it REALLY should be able to recognize the master ME drive).

I tried using an external enclosure I have, but the thing's 8 years old and I'll be damned if I could find the drivers or any markings as to who made it or anything on it to find them online.

first, NTFS partitions will be invisible to winME.  But if they are not showing up in the BIOS, there is a problem.

The hard drive may not work in slave mode.  try hooking it as a master on the second IDE port (not as slave, temporarily unhook your CD-ROM if you have one there) and see if it works.

your external enclosure should work with winME, as winME has usb mass storage drivers and that's all that is needed for external enclosures.  if you haven't used a usb mass storage device before it may prompt you for the driver cd, but check your C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS when it asks and see if the drivers are there.

If the external enclosure is as old as you say it might be a parallel-port enclosure and thus a bitch to get working properly.