Medion laptop HDD issue

I have been given an old Medion MIM2220 (MD95924) laptop with a damaged IDE hard drive. I have 2 old IDE drives that I know are good, but whenever I connect them to the laptop the BIOS refuses to recognise that they are connected.

The original drive was a Samsung and the working ones are Toshiba and Hitachi, is it possible that the BIOS is hard coded to only accept the original drive? If so is there anyway round this?

Thanks,

Are you sure it was the drive that failed rather than the IDE controller on the motherboard?

yes, the drive has bad sectors. If I connect the original drive the BIOS detects it and it starts to boot Windows but then fails

In that case are the new drives from a similar era and a similar size? Could be that the bios is limited in size of drive. Have you tried going into the bios to see if it is picking anything at all up for the drives?

All the 3 drives are 40GB, the original damaged one is 2006, and the working ones, one has not date and teh other is 2003.

When I go into BIOS, it lists Primary Master as not installed

I've had laptops come to me which had BIOS info on the HDD, and it was impossible to boot a different HDD. I thought this practice had been abandoned - but perhaps not.