new HD install has me stumped!

ok, i am an electronics engineering technician and very accustomed to computers. i have built my own and for others and fix them a lot. i currently am working on an older HP pavilion desktop and am having a major issue with installing a new HD. the reason the PC was given to me to work on was because it was getting real slow, and then stopped booting. the person first took it to circuit city however and i don't know what they did to it, but they erased all his data and reloaded the drive it seems. i got the pc and found that out after i went to recover his data and found it missing and a basic primitive load of windows xp on there. it still wasn't booting, but i had the drive plugged into my own tower and it read it fine. i still went ahead and ordered a new WD 40g HD, and proceded to load winXP on it through my machine since it's way faster. i plugged the fresh loaded HD into the HP and it won't recognize it. it gives me a boot disk error and only see's the cdrom drive. i tried the typical things, jumper settings, new ide cable, nothing. i tried to reload winXP again using the HP, and it won't format or load windows. when doing the ntfs format option it stops at 18% every time. i tried to use partition magic and format it first and then load just windows on it but that also hangs up during install. so i started thinking maybe it's more than a HD issue. i tried using HP's diagnostic software PC doctor i believe, and it tested all the system components and everything checked out good (except the HD of course, it locked up). I then tried running a BartPE cd to see if that would load, and it booted to windows fine. i could even see the HD but couldn't access it. so i know the rest of the system is in working order. i played around with a few other things, and then i put the HD back into my PC to reload it again and now it didn't even load on mine? i tried it a few times and i couldn't get it to load. something happened to it in the HP? so i RMA'd it back and just got the new one in. i was thinking it may possibly be an ide bus problem, so i tried using it on the secondary ide instead(after loading XP on my PC), and still the same boot error. no matter what this HP won't read a new HD, yet boots off a CD just fine. I'm lost. It's not old enough to where the type of HD should matter, it's a P4 and i'm only putting in a 40g ATA133 drive. they don't bearly make ATA100 anymore and all the new 133's are supposed to be backwards compatable anyway. i've had that issue before in older than P3 systems, but don't think it would be an issue here.

any clues? i refuse to believe that this HP is done for, there has to be something easy to fix on it.

 

Yeah, there is an easy fix. Install a new motherboard. From what you've posted about all the things you've tried, it seems to me that the motherboard has a faulty drive controller. It is totally possible that the faulty controller is crashing hard drives. I've seen it happen many times, esp. on laptops. You can try using different RAM on the HP, or try to flash the BIOS if an updated BIOS is available, but it may be time to accept that the motherboard has died.

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