Internal optical drive used as external

Hello,

I took out my internal optical drive from my Sony Vaio F13 laptop and put in SSD. Now I bought USB/SATA cabel and I connected the optical drive to the laptop, it is recognized in windows but it is treated as a hard drive (or removable disk). When I double click it in My Computer it says "Insert a disk into Removable disk...".

Is there a way to make my optical drive work via USB like this?

Thank you.

I am not sure that this will work - it is unlikely. If you have an eSata port, attach it there. If there is no port, get an eSata PCI Express card for little money.

Thank you.

I do have eSata/USB combo port on the laptop but the cable I have is USB/SATA only so it does not make a difference if I stick it into the eSata port. If I got myself a proper cable, like this, do you think it would work just fine? There is a video on Youtube saying it works so I might give it a try.

Edit: One more thing. Provided it works with the eSata port, would I be able to boot Windows installations?

Yes, you need an eSata cable and that should work. Booting from eSata is the same as booting from an internal device. They are on the same bus.