Why doesn't my new harddrive show up in diskutil?

Hello,

I installed a new HD in my mini recently after the old one failed. But I can't see it in diskutil or the installer when I boot up from DVD (I tried all tiger, leopard and snow leopard disks).

First I thought I bought a broken harddrive or there is some problem with the mini.

I managed to boot xubuntu from a livecd on the very same mini. And there I can see the HDD fine; I can format it, read write ... whatever I want to do.

I can also connect the mini in target mode to my macbook and there I can access the HDD fine too.

So I installed snow leopard on the HDD via target mode. Now when I boot up I get a stop sign from the mini.

I'm puzzled - if there would be a hardware problem, why does the disk work in ubuntu?

Thanks!