Yes, I pulled out the battery and removed the harddrive out, and remounted the new one. I even pulled up the specs from hp for my model to make sure there wasn't an extra step. To be honest, my computer crashed about a month ago, I just haven't really had much time to play with it. Based on the errors I was getting during recovery (write errors to the harddrive), the only other thing I think it could be would be the motherboard, and I really hope it's not the case. That's the main reason I thought the harddrive was the failure. That's cheaper to replace than the motherboard, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Once I got the harddrive in, it didn't come with any formatting disks, but the manufacturer's website said it didn't need any. I just don't know why the computer wouldnt see the harddrive as "installed" unless it wasn't formatted.