Thanks for the advice so far, the laptop is an Advent 5480DVD, 800MHz CPU with 256Mb RAM. The replacement HDD is a Hitachi DK23BA-10 (identical to the one which was removed).
When purchased, the new HDD had been formatted by the previous owner & therefore, didn’t have an OS installed. As mentioned in my previous post, when trying to partition the drive using FDISK the system hangs at 45% & then starts again from 0% (the suggestion by ORAC of using the FDISK/ACTOK switch had no effect – the system still tries to verify the drive).
I have another HDD of the same type with XP Pro installed, this works perfectly in the computer.
The real problem is that I can’t partition the replacement drive, which would allow me to install any OS. Does this make sense?