I just replaced the hard drive in a dell inspiron 1520. When I turn it on it will not recognize it, it states it needs to be powered on. I'm not sure what this means?

make sure if your hdd is recognized in the BIOS

Laptop? Are you sure the HDD is fully connected? Did you check the BIOS to make sure it's recognized? I assume it's an SATA HDD - how to you plan on reinstalling Windows?

Thanks to both of you for your response! The bios does recognize it but I found out why I was having the problem, it was not set to ATA in the "setup" section, it somehow got changed to AHC? I was able to use my recovery disks but that opened up a whole other issue. I've gone to Dell's website and tried to download programs on my other laptop but when I save them to my other laptop it doesn't recognize the format. Any suggestions? Thanks!