New hard drive problem

[Hoppyman52]

Not sure if anyone can help but I'm at my wits end.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro, I lost what I assumed was a failed hard drive. I had the dreaded ? blinking. Anyways I ordered a new 500 gb hard drive, after isolating my power source I secured the new hard drive in place by carefully connecting the sata cable re secured the back panel and booted from a new leopard 10.6 cd. All was well until it came to selecting the drive, it wasn't there to select. I back tracked and went to disc utilities and all that was in the side bar or tree was my DVD drive and cd. Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for any assistance anyone can extend.

Cheers,

 

[Weaselboy]

It is not real common, but sometimes the drive cable can be bad and causes this. Do you have an external USB enclosure you can put the drive in to see if it is detected that way? Also would be worth trying out your old drive in an enclosure.