New hard drive... help!!!!!

I installed a new hard drive in an out-of-warranty MacBook Pro (17 inch).
Had to,the old hard drive was dead.

I bought a new copy of Snow Leopard and "thought" I installed it, but I did something wrong and it keeps taking me back to the install window.


I went to Utilities> Disk Utilities and resotred the OS on the hard drive, or so I thought.

This is probably not enough information and I'm not very skilled with computers, but any ideas or tips would be much appreciated.

I'm hunching I didn't format it correctly, but just can't figure out what I did wrong.

Thanks in advance.

Standing by.....

Boot from the Snow Leopard disc, go into Utilities > Disk Utility and format the new hard drive. Drives come unformatted.

Thanks. Been mucking around in Disk Utilities for hours and can't find anything that offers me an opportunity to "format."

Disk Utilities from the boot disc?

Yes, sir. In Disk Utilities with a brand new copy of Snow Leopard I got from the Apple rep at Best Buy this morning. Told him my situation and asked if this would get me going again? He confirmed it would.

My wife just found the sequence for disk formatting on the internet. This stuff isn't intuitive to me. But apparently we had to go into the Erase portion in Disk Utilities to format. It's cooking now and has an hour and 18 minutes to go. Hope it works.

Does our latest approach sound right?

Yep and thank goodness for wives eh? My bad thought you would grasp it when you got into Disk Utility and go to erase and format. Keep coming to the forums you will learn a lot an d remember, there are no silly questions, just silly answers!