Sony Laptop Windows installation issue

Hello all,

Recently a friend dropped his laptop (Sony VGN-NR120E) and the hard drive stopped working. Everything else works fine. I slapped a different hard drive in there and the BIOS recognizes it and states it's storage capacity (60 GB) and I know for a fact this is a working drive. Tried to install windows 7 on it and everything goes smooth until I get to the screen where it asks which hard drive to install to. Nothing is there. So I went on a search for the appropriate mass storage driver and found it is an Intel 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller. Found a few different drivers, one of them from Sony, and tried to load them. Drivers loaded, still nothing. I've tried many different drivers now and I'm starting to get ticked off. Never in my life have I seen a computer this difficult to install windows on. The OEM recovery disks are not available to me. I have tried the process with Vista as well (default OS) With the same result.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!