From the sound of this you MAY have an older machine with the original SATA drive controllers (1.5 Gb/s) that do not get along with the faster SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drives. But there usually is a SIMPLE way to deal with this built into the drive! First of all, drives and controllers are supposed to make this work automatically, but we all have seen that not work! For that reason, many drive makers have a way to force a new SATA II drive to drop back to slower older SATA communication speed. Seagate and WD both use a jumper on pins on the back edge of the drive for this. WARNING: if you start moving the jumpers on a SATA drive, be sure you keep track of what you are doing. On some drives, installing a jumper on the wrong pins can temporarily disable the drive! At one time, Seagate (maybe WD - I don't know) actually shipped their drives with the jumper installed to force the unit to the old slower speed. Anyone who KNOWS their controllers are SATA II is supposed to remove that jumper. So, whatever drive you have, IF you think you have this situation of SATA controller and SATA II drive, go to the manufacturer's website and look for instructions on how to limit the new drive to the old speed.
Once that is done you ought to be able to mount the new SATA II drive inside your computer's case and connect two cables to it - one for power, and another (7 wires ribbon) to a SATA port on the mobo. Then you boot into the BIOS Setup screens and go looking for that SATA port. Make sure it is Enabled. See if the BIOS is detecting it. Now, very nearby look for the SATA Port Mode setting. IF you are using Win XP your simplest option is to set the port to IDE (or PATA) Emulation, because XP does not know how to deal with true SATA or AHCI devices. Save and Exit from here and let Windows boot up.
You still won't see your drive in Windows, even if the BIOS was happy with it. Click on Start, then RIGHT-click on My Computer in the menu. From the mini-menu choose Manage. In the new window that opens, on the left, expand Storage if necessary to choose Disk Management. On the right now are two horizontal panes, each of which SCROLLS so you can see all the stuff. The upper one has drives already in use. The LOWER RIGHT pane has hardware devices including some Windows can't use yet, and your new drive ought to be there as a horizontal block. It should have a small block at the left end showing some name like "DISK_2", a size, and a couple other items. To the right it probably will simply be called Unallocated Space.
RIGHT-click on that space and choose to Create a Primary Partition. Since you will use this for data, it does NOT need to be made bootable. Set the size you want, up to the full size of the HDD unit. If you see options for the Format part of this job, set them now. Choose the NTFS File System, and I suggest a Quick Format for a brand new drive with no reason to suspect bad sectors. (Choosing a Full Format will do all the work, BUT will also take MANY HOURS to exhaustively test the disk before proceeding.) Run this task. Now, IF there were no Format options as above, then that is done as a second step. In this case, RIGHT-click again on the Partition you just created and choose to do the Format step, then set the options and run it.
When this is all done your drive should have a Partition with a letter name, a size, a File System, etc. Back out of Disk Management and reboot your machine so Windows can recognized it. It should be there ready to use in My Computer.