Trouble replacing hard drive--MacBook won't recognize new drive

The HDD in my wife's black MacBook (2007, I think) won't boot up. I've run Disk Utility and have decided it's pretty much dead. I have a Carbon Copy backup, so the data is fine.
I've tried replacing the drive twice now, and the MacBook simply won't "see" the new drives. When I install the drive, nothing shows up in Disk Utility (run either from the install disc or the Carbon Copy backup drive in a USB enclosure).
The new drives are formatted (I even copied the bootable backup to one of them), and the computer sees them just fine if I install them in a USB enclosure and hook them up that way. When I put them in the computer, though, no dice. Her old, corrupted HDD still showed up in Disk Utility when I reinstalled it, but the new drives don't...
What am I doing wrong?!? What else can I try?

Well, I'm not too surprised with the WD drive, but am with the Seagate. I've installed numerous Seagates without ever having a problem. Most recently two XT500 hybrids in two MBPs. The WD drives on the other hand have proven problematic especially the Blue models.
In any event the problem could be jumpers or firmware configuration. The WD drive may be pre-configured to work on SATA-II 3.0 Gb/s busses, but the laptop only has a 1.5 Gb/s bus. So the drive's configuration may have to be changed. I don't believe that should be a problem with the Seagate drive, so I'm not sure what the problem with it would be.
I would contact each manufacturer's tech support to see if they can help sort things out for you. The fact that both drives work in an external enclosure does help a little since the interface cards mask certain pins on the drive that don't pass through to the internal hardware. Whatever that may be could be why the drives aren't being detected.

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