I admit I've tried that as well in the past: attach the drive to the SATA interface
after the laptop/desktop has booted and then attempt to have MHDD refresh the interface and pick up the existence of the drive but that's never worked for me either, with about 8 different laptops (Dell, HP, even a few ThinkPads).
I'm just gonna toss the drive and that'll be that, it's not worth all the hassles I suppose, a shame to waste a perfectly functional hard drive for such a trivial thing but sometimes one simply has to realize that beating a dead horse isn't helping.