Getting a laptop to recognise HDD?

[Ry@n]

I have a friends laptop here (Packard Bell).

Now he has just bought the recovery disks and asked me to fix it as it was slow. I ran a HDD test and it failed. I thought great and put a new HDD in, and went to reload windows from the recovery disks.

It then comes up with a message at the start "inconfiguration error" and wont carry on.

I have tried formatting the HDD in a caddy as NTFS and FAT32, also tried zeroing the HDD and nothing has worked. Also tried several HDD's.

Can anyone give me some things to try ? I really would like to fix this as ive been trying for a few weeks now.
Thanks,
Ryan

 

[Ry@n]

Yer its IDE but the original HDD didnt have any jumpers so i guess it doesnt need any.

Ill have to check different manufacturers but i cant see this causing the problem. I fix laptops for a living and this has been to worst laptop to work with.

 

[Ry@n]

Right i have installed the NEW hdd i got for it again, then i used my XP Pro disk and it booted from it fine, and is currently formatting the HDD ready for installation.

Looks like the discs he bought for £37!!!! are not the correct ones of faulty?

Anyway, im going to see if this works, if it does then ill get him to return the disks and leave it at that.

Thanks allot