Have a Gateway laptop 7320 GZ, It's not recognizing the hard drive so my first assumption is that it has gone bad.
 
If I put a new drive in, can I then with my Norton Ghost boot disc and restore disk get everything up and running?
Will a new hard drive change the computor ID and negate the authorization of windows xp  or anything else?
 
Also, any thoughts on how I could do any further tests before purchaing a hard drive?
 
Thanks for your input.

I put a new Harddrive in windows XP and had no problem. In fact I only had one 160Gb hard drive when I bought the computer, and now (it still runs) I have a 500Gb harddrive for the boot drive and the 160Gb (old but still working) is hooked up as the second drive in the computer.
 
I think it has more to do with motherboard lately (if changing that - meaning different computer), because I have also changed the video card also in the computer since the old one went bad.
 
 
 

That will work fine. I assume you have the ghost image on a second hard drive? If it's an older computer you need to know if the drive is ide or sata and if there is any bios limits to hard drive size. If you want to post the exact error message you're getting maybe we can help in troubleshooting.
 Edit: looks like it has an 80GB 4200rpm ide/ata drive. You can verify that by going to support.gateway.com and putting in your exact model.
 
Good luck,
Steve