Laptop hard drive replacement woes

[crossd47]

I'm having major problems installing a replacement drive for the original which crashed in my HP Pavilion 5300 series laptop. I bought a refurbished drive with exactly the same model name (IBM LecStar) as the original. Following the instructions in the downloaded HP User Manual, I've installed the drive (I haven't formatted it--instructions said nothing about that) and have attempted to use my System Recovery Disk, supplied when I bought the machine 2 years ago, to put XP Home on the replacement drive. Every time I've tried, I get to a screen which says "PMakPart Ver. 3.13" and then I get an error saying "Error encountered while creating Save to Disk Partition." (A note here--the original drive was partitioned and the replacement is not--could this be the problem?)

When I run diagnostics at startup, I'm told "Warning: No Hard Disk Drive Detected." Yet, when I run diagnostics on the Drive, it will do a read test on the drive, although it does return an error at the first sector. The BIOS reports a 30006 MB Internal Disk.

HP User support suggested borrowing a retail OS disk and trying to install from that. I did that with a friend's XP Pro disk and got as far as "Examining 28,616 MB IDE Disk 0 at address 0 at Bus 0 on atapi..." and I get no further response.

I googled the System Recovery error message, but got nothing useful.