Help needed new HDD in HP N3210 laptop

had an old laptop sitting around wanted to use in my easy chair to access football, it had win98SE, 32MB ram 433 mhz and 4mb hdd and cd/r, pc card slot, AMD K6-2 processor and modem, so I bought new 40GB hdd, 256MB RAM(max), pc card wireless-G linksys, I've got wireless-G router with 3 other destops runing on it. I installed ram it worked fine, then installed new Samsung hdd 40gb, 5400rpm ATA 100/ultra, set as master. I had battery out and no power to unit, it now will boot to HP Pavilion logo and hangs F2 to go into setup and it goes to finding IDE configuration and hangs, have tried booting with 98recovery cd, floopy drive win98 boot disc, and wndows XP pro install disc, for new install. Nothing will get it into boot sequene to read CD, or floppy drive, light comes on and you can hear cd cranking up will not read long enought to boot, same on floppy. I have reinstalled old hdd and boots fine, install new hdd and same have gone thru this many times. I have battery out and held down on switch with no power on to reset CMOS, out of ideas, not the smartest computer person on the block just enought to get in trouble. I have usb socket 1.1, open serial and paralle port open pc card socket. What can I do or try to get it to boot. I have gone back into BIOS and set 1st boot as floppy and nothing back to cd 1st boot nothing. I'm 62 years old and stumped any help from you guys will be greatly appreciated. Thanks catsrdawg.

 

I'm still looking for HELP!!!!!! Please!

 

I will ask the first question, is the jumpers in the same spot on the new hard drive compared to the old one that works?

 

yes, there is an adapter to connect the hdd to the HP slot, the original hdd had no jumper on and the new one has same configuration. I finally got the USB to read the flash drive I have, had to go find driver for windows 98 from cruzer micro to make it do. I reacon what I need is a driver I can load onto boot disk where CD will read windows install disk when I put it in, with new hdd laptop tries to read new hdd, but can't and therefore will not load new install of windows XP, I am scared to try to install XP on old hdd and then install new hhd and new install of XP on it, only 4098mb (mb) of space on old hdd. Thanks for asking, anything else, please question on!