Blinking "?" folder and cant get to Disk Utility!

Hello,
So i am having a few issues here. I have a solid state drive and a regular drive that i cant get working in either Macbook Pro's i have. I took both drives and formatted them in my Mac Pro to OS Extended (Journaled). I have then tried putting the drives in either macbook pro and i get the blinking "?" folder every time. I tried holding doing the "c" key and still nothing. Both theses drives were just working in the computers but something went wrong when i tried to just plug in the SDD from one Macbook pro to another in hopes i could just run the new macbook pro just as i had the old one.
Any help would be so great!
Thanks!

 

blinking folder

They once had operating systems, but i erased everything through the disk utility when i hooked the drives up to my Mac Pro. Can you install an operating system on a drive from my mac pro and then put it in the laptops and it should work?
What do you mean by a recovery partition? I did have time machine backup that i would like to put on the SDD, but i cant get to the disk utility on the laptops to do so and it wont start from my snow leopard disk i have. I bought Lion and Mountain lion as well, but i dont have discs for those.
Thanks again for the help!

 

firmware password lock

So was doing some more research and I found that my firmware is locked. when i hold down the option key during start up it has a picture of a lock with a password space.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1352

Is there anyway of removing this firmware lock? figured putting in a formatted drive would have done it?

 

firmware

Thanks for the response.
My macbook pro is a late 2011. I wonder if that is the case tho because i was able to put back in another hard drive that works. only problem is it was a 120 gb 5400 rpm drive that is just not going to cut it!
Thanks again