Can I Make A Combo Drive An External Disk Drive?

For some reason, my combo drive has become very tight inside my 06 Macbook 1.83GHz. To the point where it won't load a disc by itself. I have to force the disc in and then it can't eject it.

I took it out and tried to make it an external disc drive. (I have a board that plugs into the back and turns it into a USB interface). However, the computer didn't recognize the drive. It still works; accepts discs and all, but it won't mount and it won't recognize keyboard inputs, such as eject.

Anyone dealt with this before or know how to get it to be recognized? I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.7.