Newly Installed iPod Hard Drive Won't Format?

My friend recently helped me replace a 160GB hard drive for my IPod classic, which we bought from this site. Physically, everything went very smoothly. The IPod turns on, the menu displays, and it connects to my Macbook. Wonderful.

However, we're having a problem with formatting the thing. ITunes recognizes it and gave us the option to format. It claimed their were 0kb left on the IPod, so we tried formatting it. No go. After downloading the firmware, it gives us an error message that claims that the firmware is not compatible.

We tried to override the need for a format by erasing the IPod's data, manually, in disk utilities. This actually got the IPod to be recognized as a classic with 160GB, in ITunes and actually let us "sync". However, this still didn't work, as when the sync was done, and I unplugged, it just reset and erased all my information. Despite that, however, when I plugged it back in, it claimed everything was on there. Weird.

Anyway, I think it needs a reformat and any help would be much appreciated.

The serial # on the IPod is O24090R09ZU