Hdd test = dead laptop?

I wanted to buy a HDD from a friend at school. I was going to use it for a computer I'm going to build in 2 weeks. He told me the drive worked perfectly a month ago, the only problem was that he couldn't back-up the files on the disk. He didn't have any SATA-connections left, so I took the drive home and pluged it into my laptop. I have one 2,5" drive in my laptop, which I removed. I have a little power/data combined plug which has a really short cable in my laptop, so I used some magazines to lift the laptop up and plugged the hdd in.

When I started windows I got an error about checking the cable, and after that I got the message that there was no operating system found. I figured that since it was a drive from his dad, it might have been a second disk.

I plugged in my own drive, closed everything up and started my laptop. guess what: same message. I went into my bios and there was no fixed drive. I tried to reinstall windows but there was no drive found.

what happened?

if the system is not picking up any hdd and you know the drive is OK then the controller on the mobo is probably dead.
Try it with a disk you know for certain is working ok