I have a 2.5" laptop harddrive that I plugged into my laptop through a SATA to USB cable. It's powered by an adapter to a normal wall-plug. I want to use it as an external harddrive.

It wouldn't initialize (Device is not ready), so as suggested in some instructions I found I uninstalled the drivers, unplugged it and plugged it back in. That worked, and I initialized the drive and formatted it.

However I unplugged it after that and a few days later the same strategy does not work and I can't figure out how to use the drive. I can't initialize it and it doesn't show up in my computer.