pavilion xt375 tshoot the ide controllers?

Another good one:
Someone brought me a HP Pavilion xt375, supposedly the hdd went bad- he needed his quickbooks, jpegs, docs etc. that I was able to recover. There was apparently damage to the file system. A program called recovery 2000 was able to to recover 12 gig of data. the hdd would not format, when I'd put it intop another laptop, you get the "primary slave fails" error and so on. 100% certain the hdd was and is bad. So I go buy a brand new seagate 40 gig, install it into the notebook, and proceed to run the 1st of 6 recovery cd's . Right at the point the recovery was to create the partitions, it freezes. I tried this several times, same result . freezes at a part of total recovery called "PMakPart version 4.13"
(I make note that this is right when the disk needs to perform functions_ create the partitions). I called hp and they determined that the seagate disk I just paid 150.00 for was bad. Funny, I have another hp notebook ze5500 series that I was able to load a copy of windows xp on-and run it w/o the slightest problem-using the very same disk.  Anyway, I tried running thre sys recovery disks fron my ze5500 on the xt375, and that too, froze at a point where disk activity needed to begin. So, next, I put the new drive back into the 375 and tried to simply load a copy of xp- I ran through the setup absolutely normal. it read fron the dvdrw, copied the setup files to the new disk just fine. only when it came time to restart to begin the install, it rebooted and promptly froze when it was supposed to start the xp install.
THEN, I decided to use the ze5500 to load a copy ox xp onto the new drive, then put that into the xt375- it will not boot. I left it sitting for about 30 min. or so, and i did see a boot option menu. it actually did boot ONCE-  it even went into the hardware detection frenzy. But when I shut it down, It will boot no more. Just freezes right after the post.
It almost seems like it's working- sometimes- but just very very very slowly. The hdd activity light is solid during these lockup periods(and 1 slow slow boot period) As if something were blocking the flow of data from the drive to the mobo. Is there a way to test the ide controllers? I swapped the memory around, makes no diff. I was able to get into the diagnostic part of the recovery set, and it passes. I did a pin-reset of the bios. I did power cycles.  What could be causing the data not to flow to(or from) the hdd?? what tools are available to tshoot this type of thing?? I know I kinda ramble on, but I just want to try and get all of my observations out there in case someone has seen similar. Any and all help appreciated.....