Hard Drive Issue

Hello,
own an ascer laptop, tried to boot it up it beeped and screen is black then more beeps and the message states something about the ethernet cable not enabled. Its wireless, so I connected the cable I have at home it searched and searched and searched... nothing kept searching. Tried to put in the restore cd nothing. Took the hard drive out bought an external case and hooked it to the desktop but it won't read that another hard drive is present. Just like everyone else my files are ridiculously important. What should I do?

Is it not reading the drive because my laptop ran vista and my desktop runs xp?