Can't boot after HD change

[helpinout]

My friend's Presario S4100NX has gotten too slow for him.  There is not a lot that can be done as 1GB RAM is max, and the system is already there.  I checked for viruses etc. but did not find anything.  I noticed the HD is a slow one, so I cloned that drive to a 7200 RPM spare drive of mine.  Once I tried to boot from the cloned drive, all I got was a blinking cursor on the upper left corner of the monitor.

BIOS read the drive correctly.  I've since replaced the original HD and attached the new HD as primary secondary and ran disk checks and nothing is wrong.

I reset CMOS memory, returned the BIOS to factory defaults, disconnected all but the new HD and tried to boot, but it still has only the blinking cursor.  While using the new HD, I used the system restore partition of the new HD to re write the OS partition.  That went fine, but I still get only the blinking cursor.

Both drives are cable select.

I tried to write a set of recovery CDs from which I planned to use to build the OS on the new HD, but after unpacking the partition/space and going to write the CD, the application just keeps asking me to load CD 1 into the tray and pressing the door all the way closed.  I used several CD-R's and nothing seemed to write, but I didn't get any errors either.  It is a Lite-On Combo Drive.  Since I've never used it to know if it works in the first place, I stopped trying.  PCpitstop's driver scan says the driver I have is the latest.

So then I remembered that I had a retail copy of XP that I'm not using so I thought I'd at least try to use it to rebuild the OS on the new HD to see if I could get anywhere.  BIOS is set to boot from the CD ROM device first, but guess what - all I get is that lousy blinking cursor.  I know the CD works to boot from as I used it to read the cloning software.  Thank goodness, I can still boot from the original drive.

Any idea's what is going on?