How do I check whether the enclosure failed or the hard drive failed?

I have a spare 500 GB 3.5" internal SATA HDD which I decided to be used as an external HDD. Recently, I bought an 3.5" enclosure (3.5 inch Cavalry EN-CAXM SuperSpeed USB 3.0 enclosure) for this. I am using USB to connect to this to my laptop. For powering, it comes with external power adapter.

The drive shows up in file explorer as a removable disk but upon clicking it, it says:

"Please insert a disc into removable disk". In properties, it shows 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free space.

Running chkdsk says:

"Cannot open volume for direct access"

Changing drive letter in disk management did not help. Also, there seems to be no sound of spinning.

My question is, how do I know what is at fault? The enclosure or the hard disk? The hard disk was attached to a computer which crashed more than a year ago and had not been used since.

More info: Running Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Also tried in Vista 32-bit and 7 HP 64-bit.

Solution 1:

If you have another spare 3.5" disk, you could try attaching that to your adapter. If it doesn't work, it's probably the adapter.

If you have a spare SATA cable, you could connect the 3.5" disk via SATA, boot Windows, and see if you can access the drive then. If you can, it's the adapter.

If you have a spare USB memory stick or blank CD, you could put a portable operating system on it (like pen drive ubuntu), wire up the SATA power and data cables to the disk you're trying to test (disconnect them from your main disk for now, if you don't have a spare SATA cable), and boot to your bootable medium. Try to see if you can access the disk from there.