Interesting......
If you remove the IDE lead to the hard drive and just connect the power you should on start up of the PC get a sound of something spinning inside. If you dont it may be the hard drive drive board in the drive has blown.
If above ok and you get a sound like spinning check your BIOS to see it this is up to date as it may not recognize high capacity drives for that BIOS ver. Also check you have set the drive as Master or slave pending on what you are wanting to use it for. Ie on same IDE one drive must be master and other slave. If you have set say both to master the BIOS will get confused and wont see it.
If ok in BIOS check to see if slave you have set a partition and formatted it if not you will not see the drive in windows. Also if a patron is set in NTFS and you are using a FAT ie windows 98 opsystem windows will not see it.
In XP you will find in the control panel administrative tools and in this computer management. Look for disk management and form here you can check your disks status as well as set a patron and format. Note this is only of use if you can see the drive in the BIOS.
The other tell tale to a drive being faulty is the BLACK hole in a chip where the silicon chip use to be due to being blown up big time. 
All in all the drive should spin up when power connected to it if not you have a dead drive.
Hope this helps 