15" Macbook Pro (A1211, 2007) won't boot off of anything

My cousin's macbook pro had it's hard drive crash, so I popped it open for him and replaced it with an extra 120GB drive I had from my A1150 macbook pro. The 120GB drive did not have an operating system on it, so when I booted it up I got a "blinking folder with a question mark". I tried to boot off of a OSX cd, but it didn't work. He told me he had recently been having problems with the DVD drive reading discs before the hard drive crashed, so I ordered a UJ-857-C super drive to replace it. I have that drive in place now and I am still unable to boot from a Snow Leopard DVD. I am also not able to eject the DVD as I was able to do with the old "bad" drive. The DVD drive audibly spins up, but I still get the same "blinking folder with a question mark". I've tried booting with the mouse button pressed, booting and the pressing command-option-o-f, and neither of these have any effect. Any ideas? I'm lost...

I don't know about the booting problem, but when my MacBook Pro's optical drive didn't want to eject the CDs, I just kept it on for a while and then it would eject them on its own. Or just lift the MacBook and upside down and start sort of like tapping on the CD area and then it would fall.

MBP's optical drive FAILS!

This may be a stretch but if you can get a fire wire cable ... hook both of the mac's up to it .. put yours in target mode put the os x dvd in hold the alt key on your cousins mac and try to boot from the dvd that way.. other thing you could try ... this may not be totaly legit.. but hook them both up again with the fire wire cable ... put his mac in target mode ... download SuperDuper to yours and clone your hard drive to his ... and off you both go... (as long as 2 copies of the os were purchaced from Apple) you should be good to go..