Installation problems - Leopard installer doesn't recognise harddrive

Question

I've installed a new drive in my Macbook Pro and am facing some problems installing 10.5 Leopard.
Specs of stuff are:
Machine: Macbook Pro 2.4 15.4in (Late 2007)
New drive: Western Digital Scorpio Blue 320Gb
Old drive: Fujitsu 160Gb (original drive)
So I backed everything up and dismantled the machine and fit the new drive. No problems there.
Booted from the 10.4 Tiger discs that came with the machine to do a fresh install. This detected the new drive fine, allowed me to partition it and merrily installed Tiger.
I then turned to the drop-in cd of Leopard that came with the machine to upgrade to Leopard. Booted into that fine and then the first problem. The installer says it can't fine a Tiger install to upgrade.
Disk utility from the install disk doesn't show the drive. Not just the partitions, but the drive itself.
System Profiler does show the drive but doesn't display much information about it, in particular, the "Partition Type" is listed as "Unknown".
So, I rebooted into Tiger and everything was fine.
Thinking the partition was somehow not right, I attached and external drive, and used a retail copy of Leopard to install 10.5 onto that. I then booted the machine from the external drive.
And the new internal drive appears when the machine is booted.
So the Leopard startup disc can't see the partition, but Leopard booted and running can. Very strange.
Anyway, when booted from the external drive, I wiped the new internal drive by writing zeroes to it. Re-created the partition (ensuring that the type was "GUID Partition Table" to make it bootable) a couple of times. Wrote zeroes again and partitioned again just to make sure and rebooted from the retail Leopard install disc.
And again, Leopard fails to show the new drive as an install destination or in Disk Utility. It does appear in the System Profiler again, but again it is listed as Partition Type: Unknown".
So in short, Tiger will detect and install to this drive, but Leopard won't even detect it from the install discs (both retail and upgrade).
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ben.

Answer 1

If you have a retail copy of Leopard I would suggest using it rather than first installing Tiger and trying to use an Upgrade disc.
As for the new drive I suggest doing the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Set the number of partitions from the drop down menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
You should now be able to install OS X once the formatting has completed.