Power Mac G5 Showing Prohibitory Sign on Start Up?

Earlier this week my Power Mac G5 1.8 ghz dual started to show a prohibitory sign on start up. The hard drive was original to the machine (from 2004) and I wanted to upgrade it to a larger size anyhow, so I put in a new hard drive thinking that might solve the problem and give me an upgrade at the same time.
After I installed the new hard drive, I formatted it and did a restore from Time Machine of my system. When I restarted, I got the prohibitory sign again. I restarted holding down the option key to see if it found the new drive and it did. So I selected the new drive and it started up from the new drive with my restored system on it with no problem. Then I went to system preferences and made sure the new hard drive was selected as my start up disk. On restart, I got the prohibitory sign again.
Then the weirdness started. On subsequent restarts, I get the prohibitory sign intermitently whether I'm starting from the hard drive, my Leopard installation DVD, my Disk Warrior boot disk, or my old Panther installation disk. It seems to boot without any problem from the Apple Hardware test CD. I've run the extended apple hardware test and it didn't find any problems. Most of the time, I get a prohibitory sign no matter how I'm trying to boot up, but sometimes it will boot from the Leopard installation disk or the hard drive, but when it does, it freezes after running for a few minutes. I've tried swapping out the memory sticks and it's made no difference.
Is it possible this is a software problem and not a problem with the motherboard or other hardware? I sure hope so, because I love this machine. Anyone have any suggestions about what I might try next? I've read about the "hair dryer" solution, but if Apple Hardware Test didn't find any probemms with the memory or motherboard, could that still be a solution?
Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Thanks, japamac. Yep, I should have said I replaced the old hard drive with the new one. So, it now only has the one, new fresh hard drive. The new drive is a WD Caviar Blue 320gb.
I set the jumpers on the new drive for 5-6 to slow the new drive down to 1.5. I've also tried resetting the PRAM several times, and tried restarting in safe mode. Every few tries I can get it to boot from the hard drive or a boot DVD/CD (maybe once every 10 tries), but it freezes up after running for about 10 minutes. The only instance this doesn't happen is if I boot with the Apple Hardware Test CD. It didn't freeze up during the 2 hours it took to run the extended test.
Thanks for trying to help me.

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