Harddrive issues goes to black screen.

Hi there! Hoping someone can give me some advice on my laptop as it has been having issues for a while. WIll try to make this short. It is a refurbished Dell Latitude E6500. It has Windows 7 on it. Trouble started a few weeks ago with a notice, as it was starting, about needing to reseat the harddrive. I researched how to do this and did it. I continued to receive the same notice about this but was able to hit F12 to do some form of diagnostics and from there could just hit EXIT and the computer would function normally. Then it became more frequent even as I reseated the drive several times.

So, I got a new harddrive at BestBuy but of course there is no OS or anything to actually make it all work. I know I am probably doing things all wrong here but I put a WIndows XP disk from my husband's computer in with the new HD ( just fishing for signs of life here) and got nothing. Old HD in now and here is what it does:
I can turn it on and all it does is go to a black screen with a cursor blinking. If I turn it on and hold F8 then I can go to the list where safe mode and what all is available. I have selected several of these and all it does is go to a light blue ( windows type) screen and does NOTHING. I have an arrow that is responsive to the touchpad at this point but can't DO anything from here. So, thoughts? I hope this is not totally hopeless...thanks for reading and I would appreciate any help.