Why is a new hard drive not recognized?

The 60 GB hard drive died, so I purchased the exact same thing, but the new drive was used and reformatted. It was recognized immediately after installation, so I just shut it down. After obtaining restoring disks, ( a week later), I restarted the laptop, but this time the hard drive was not detected in Bios, which was the same problem I had with the original. I don't know of any way to test this second hard drive, so it might be faulty or corrupt. I do not want to invest anymore money if the problem is with the laptop and not the hard drive. What other problem could keep a hard drive from being recognized?

Thank you, so very much, for your response. I tried resetting both the new and the old drives and the results were exactly the same with both. The IBM recovery disk fails to initialize, but it did start without changing the boot order in Bios. So maybe I can rule out a power supply or mother board problem. I doubt if the new disk was tested before it was sold and it may have bad sectors. I don't know if it was properly reformatted because for the brief time, that it ran, names of the former owner's appeared on a log in screen, along with the windows XP operating sytem logo. I'm not sure if this indicates a complete erase. IBM warns that the frequent removing and installing of hard drives can cause damage. So I hope that I haven't jumped from the frying pan into the fire with my attempt to repair.

Thanks again