Multiple issues with new hard drive

I recently got a new Hitachi hard drive, and at first it didn't show up in My Computer, so I configured it and finally got it to work. Afterwords, I booted from a Windows XP Pro installation disc and I installed it on the new drive, bypassed the NTFS conversion since I did that earlier, and continued through the rest successfully. When I booted into the OS, everything was fine until I tried to install the necessary drivers. I installed all of my motherboard drivers and rebooted. Upon reboot, an error message came up and basically stated that I couldn't boot from it because it didn't recognize the drive. After that, I decided to try again. Before I did so, I disconnected the old drive to see if that would help. When setup initialized again, I selected the drive to install it on and it said that it was an incompatible partition. I connected the old drive again and rebooted, and all of the sudden it allowed me to install it. This time I used the quick NTFS conversion to see if that fixed it, and I was able to access the OS however it was noticeably slower. I rebooted without installing drivers to see if the same error would occur, but it didn't. I disconnected the old drive again and I wasn't able to boot; it's like the system relies on the old drive to function properly. I booted again and noticed that there are three versions of XP that I can boot from now. One is the original, another is on the Hitachi drive, and the last one doesn't work at all to my knowledge (the one that the drivers were installed in). This might not be related, but now on my old OS the internet seems slower and I can't sign in to Windows Live Messenger. Does anyone have an idea whether this is a software issue or a hardware issue, and how to possibly fix it?

Many thanks in advance.

UPDATE: It looks like the time I set as default during installation on the new OS has been applied to the old OS also, I'm not at all sure why any of this is happening.