Getting a WD refurb (rox0rz!) to work

Hi all.
I have been trying all afternoon to get my 250GB WD’s to work. I have 2 and neither are working.
I opened my PC and put them on the IDE cable that would usually run my DVD drives. Then I booted. Kept getting a disk error on boot up so I finally got the bios setup so it would load. Couldn’t get WD Datalifegaurd to see the drives, but I did find one when I went to “Control Panel” - “Administartive Tools” - “Computer Management” - and clicked on “Disk Management”. I partitioned the drive with one partition and chose not to assign a drive letter or path since I will be putting it in an external enclosure (this may have been a mistake). It partitioned and formatted the drive, but it still didn’t show up under “My Computer”. I put the drive in an enclosure and rebooted and plugged in to USB, it saw the drive as a mass media storage device, but still nothing under “My Computer”.
Thats where I’m at - one that seems like it may have a chance of working, and one the does not seem to work at all. Can anyone tell me if I’m on the right track, and what I should do now?
Thanks,
ed.