Why wont my ps3 model cech 4001c work?

So my friend broke his ps3 by a way that I don't happen to know, if I had to guess he dropped it or had a bad update. He gave it to me so I decided to invest in fixing it. I noticed what he meant by broken. Every time you turned on the ps3, it would go all black and a screen would pop up telling you to plug in the controller and press the home button. So I did that and then this message always pops up "the system software cannot be run correctly. Press the PS button to try to restart the system. If the system cannot be restarted(which it couldn't), you must reinstall the system software. Connect storage media that contains update data of version 4.70 or later, and then press the START and SELECT buttons at the same time...." so I tried that with the what I assumed broken hard drive and apparently nothing worked even using the safe mode option. Restart System: obviously didn't worked just repeated the whole process. Restore Default Settings: It starts to download then resets and goes back to saying, "the system software cannot be run correctly. Press the PS button to try to restart the system. If the system cannot be restarted....". So I looked up my problem and put the new update data on a u.s. and connected it and attempted to update through safety mode to get the same thing happen. I have bought and installed a new hard drive and I have used a flash drive with the data on it and attempted all this again and it is still not working. Someone please give me some help. I'm what else to do. Only thing I can think of is to hook my ps3 directly into a computer and attempt to format it. Advice needed. Thank you