Trying to instal a new hard drive in my old macbook pro laptop but it wont recognize the disk to install osx

I want to give my old macbook pro away as a gift & bought a 250 GB SATA internal hard drive and installed it, then popped in the osx install disk.  When I start it up it begins well, but when it gets to the point to install the software on the drive, the drive simply doesnt show up on the menu to be chosen to instal the software.
The cables are on right and should be working well, so I don't understand why this brand new, never used hard drive doesn't allow the software to mount.  Thanks for the help! 

jcbarker wrote:
It's a toshiba 250 gb.  The place I bought it from said it was, but as I type this, I'm startting to think it's not.  Could I simply take it out of the laptop, put it into an enclosure and format it using another mac? 
Would that work or is there a better/ different way?  Thanks again.
How about an exact model number, there are a lot of 250G Toshiba drives, but even if it is formatted for Windows it should not be necessary to remove it just to format it.
Can you see the drive in Disk Utility? (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility)

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