Disk Utility won't recognize new hard drive

Hello,
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
The original hard drive (80 GB) went bad, so I replaced with a new 160 GB Western Digital one. I formatted the hard drive using Disk Utility from the Mac OS X Disk. It worked the first time I booted into Leopard (I just booted up to make sure the OS loaded...didn't install any new software and/or hardware).
Then I shut it down and started it back up, and the computer didn't recognize the hard drive. I inserted the Mac OS X disk and ran Disk Utility, but the hard drive was not recognized.
So now I'm thinking the new hard drive was also bad. So, I ordered another one (Seagate 160 GB) and it to was not recognized when I ran Disk Utility from the Mac OS X disk.
When replacing all of them, I followed directions I found here and other websites. They all said to do it the same way, so I'm assuming the directions for replacing a hard drive in a laptop were correct.
I searched Google and found several posts suggesting using an application called Disk Warrior, but from my understanding, you cannot run it from a disk, it needs to be installed, which is obviously impossible since the hard drive isn't recognized.
Then I ran Open Firmware and did "devalias" from the prompt. From what I can tell in the list of hardware, the hard drive is recognized, but I am not sure. I took a picture of the screen printout but do not see an option to attached it to this post. Therefore, I'll just tell what it said for now and will create an image hosting account so I can add a URL for it later.
In the list, "hd" is in the left column and in the right column of the same line is "/pci@f4000000/ata-6@d/disk@0" (without quotes).
If anybody has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the Apple discussions.
I've replaced a few hard drives, and in instances where it's not recognized, it's either been a cable connection issue or I've seen others with a jumper issue. Either the hard drive to logic board cable isn't properly set, typically on the logic board side, or a jumper was left on the drive, where typically you can just remove it. I haven't personally had the cable fail, however, that's possible too.
When you pulled the large plug from the back of the original hard drive, did you do it very carefully? It's not like a desktop hard drive plug that you can just pull out ... it needs to be wiggled out, gently. I have a hard time believing two new drives would be essentially DOA, although the first one worked for a bit, which leads me to wonder about the physical connections.
Since you have your original OS X disks, you could try running the Apple hardware test to see if it gives you any error message(s).

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