trying to install a new hard drive on a compaq presario v3000.  actually let me start from the BEGINNING.  the OLD ONE just stopped working one day.  went into bios and ran a hard drive test and said no ide device was detected.  my initial thought was the drive went bad since the computer has been dropped a few times.  took it out and put the new one.  it was my brother-in-law's so since it had an OS on it already thought it would boot right up.  it didn't.  decided to LOAD windows 7 on it to see if that would solve the problem.  got to the point where you pick which drive to load it on and is saying there isn't one detected.  clicked on load driver but problem is i don't have it.  been on hp website trying to find the hdd drivers for this model and haven't had any luck.  any thoughts?For Windows 7, that driver shouldn't be needed. Those drivers were usually only necessary for XP and prior OSes that couldn't see SATA drives.

With the drive in, go to the BIOS. Is the driver shown there?

If not, either that hard drive also doesn't work or dropping the computer has damaged something other than the hard drive.

You could try popping the drives into an external USB box and see if they can be read when plugged into another computer, but I'm guessing the drives aren't the problem here. Laptops never take very well to bring dropped from more than a few inches.