OK, make sure it is pluged in to the power, make sure the IDE cable goes on the right way and is plugged into the primary connector, make sure your hard drive is set to "master" on the drive itself, get into bios and set it to autodetect the drive.
If it is already detecting the drive and still gives you that message, you will need to use a boot floppy, format the drive. If you can't format the drive, run FDISK, remove any partitions and repartition. Then restart and format. You will then need to run setup from your CD. If you don't know how to do all this, find someone with a lot of patience.
Suicide is painless...........