Installing a New Hard Drive, can't format

O.K. here’s the short story of how I got to my current problem. On a Mac Mini G4.
My computer locked up, and would not restart. I ran diagnose (using the alt keep at start up) and found that my hard drive had died. I tried a couple of things, including a reinstall, fix disk (note that the disc drive is still working at this point), with no joy. After that and some research I realized my hard drive was dead, and needed a new one.
I purchased a new 160gb hard drive and installed it correctly (99% sure), got everything back together. I attempted to boot from my install disk to format the dive, but now it’s not seeing the optical drive. I’ve tried booting holding down C, nothing happens. I’ve tried going into the selector with the alt key held down at the boot, it goes into the screen where you can usually select the optical drive (or the hard disk if it has an operating system) but it sees nothing. I’ve also tried booting with the firewire option as a secondary disk, but it only shuts down after about 20 seconds without going into firewire drive. I’ve tried the install 10.4 mac mini disk and a full install mac os 10.3 disk. The disk drive runs, and I can see it working. I just keep ending up at the blinking folder with a ? and mac smile.
What next?

What next?
Welcome to the Apple discussions.
Take it apart and ensure the optical drive cables and hard drive are completely seated.

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Installing a New Hard Drive, can't format

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