HELP w/iBook, New Hard Drive; OSX does not detect

Question

couple of months ago, my ibook was acting up
I thought it was the Hard Drive... because at first, the position of the laptop affected it (it would like freeze, and all i had to do was stand the laptop up and then i'd be fine) so i thought it was hardware......
I checked the disk utility.....
and SMART was reporting serious errors......
so i felt it was the HD gone bad, after the many times of "banging" it around (nothing big tho)
and then......
it didnt start anymore
it would "freeze" and get error
so it was basically dead....
I FINALLY got a new Hard DRive for it and i was thrilled
I had CompUsa install it for me for $30....
I was gonna install osx myself.....
I picked it up
did the "Apple Hardware Test"
just to do it.....
everything checked out fine....... "Mass Storage - Passed"
I put the OS discs in and im clicking away "continue, etc"
it comes to the point where it asks me to choose a destination
a partition on the hard drive i presume......
and there's nothing there
my hard drive just isnt listed.....
I figured the hard drive just needed to be formatted......
aftere eventually realizing that there's a disk utility available during installation....
I thought i had figured it all out......
but upon opening the disc utility....
again, the utility did not detect the hard drive....
did CompUsa not plug the hard drive in right? is that even possible?
OR........
is the hard drive i bought not compatible?
I ordered from:https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
who specialize in mac stuff.....
I bought my laptop early 2004, and according to the site, i should be fine...
I then figure out my laptop is a 2003 model? 800mhz, etc. but even then,
the site says all 2003 models are supported.....
ahh.....
why is OSX not detecting it?
I wanna format, partition, and have my ibook back for good.....
and why does my "apple hardware test" say that my mass storage system is fine?
I tried searching for solutions....
I read someone whom had a similar problem....
and it turned out it was an OSX problem, not hardware....
anyways...
I sure dont hope that's the case, since i already bought the new Hard Drive...
im so confused....
do i tell CompUsa they didnt install it "right"?
someone please help
thank you

Answer 1

I'm not sure why everyone's so fixated on the hard drive's partitioning and whatnot... that wouldn't have any relation to whether or not you could boot from the Mac OS X install disk. From the sounds of it, your problem is that you have no bootable system on the hard drive and can't boot from the Mac OS X install disk, correct?
If that's right, then the problems are very simple indeed. First, your machine may not meet the [Snow Leopard system requirements|http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html], thus can't boot from a SL install disk. If this is a 2008 MBP, that's unlikely.
Second, you could be using a bad disk. The most likely explanation, in my experience, is that you're using the gray disks that shipped with a different machine. You did say that it was a retail disk, though, so I'm assuming that's not it. You could also have a retail disk with a system that's too old. You [can't install an older system than what your Mac shipped with|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2186]. That also doesn't seem likely if this is indeed a 2008 MacBook Pro. Or, perhaps the disk itself is defective.
The other possibility would be some kind of hardware problem, perhaps involving the optical drive.
One way to determine what's going on is to try booting with the gray disks that shipped with your machine. If you can't boot from those disks either, you're probably looking at an optical drive problem. If you can, try running [Apple Hardware Test|http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509] to rule out other possible hardware problems.