I have a laptop that when it boots it goes to the XP load screen for about 2 seconds and then a blue screen of love.

I ran a linux boot disk to try to trouble shoot it but we couldn't get it to see the drive.

I bought a sata 2.5 drive enclosure and hooked it up to my other computer with the laptop drive in it and it can't see it. The drive gets warm but thats all.

I pulled my other laptop drive out and put it into the drive enclosure and it worked fine.

What can I do?
What options do I have to see if this is still a good drive?
Does this mean the drive is dead?
Do I need to load drivers?
Can I force mount it?

Any thoughts???

WD 2.5 sata drive 60gig. Compact laptop. About two years old.

sounds like the drive is dead.

It could also be a number of other things. It could be a rare combination of a lot of things. Perhaps the 'bad' drive has a newer file system that isn't recognized by the desktop? (XP -> Win98/ME, Vista -> XP, Linux -> Windows, etc). It could also be the laptop is locking the drive, preventing it from working in anything but the original laptop. The fact you see XP start to boot indicates the drive at least works somewhat. It might still be bad, but it should work at least as good as that in another computer.

I'm not sure why the Linux boot disk couldn't see the drive. Silly question, but did you mount the drive? Have you tried a bootable Windows CD?