install help

[ppmaster]

hello fellow linus fans, i have some trouble with and older laptop well i would like to just say motherboard which i recently obtained i hooked up a to an older hard drive and went to install windows 7 ultimate with a bootable usb started it up and the usb didnt boot tried to boot it again but with linux mint that didnt work either so i decided it was time to bring out my old windows xp home install disc and a dvd drive popped in the disc booted right up to setup but when i hit enter to continue it said i didnt have a hard drive installed so that was quite confusing so i re did the process and same thing but i dont have any other windows install discs so what do i do? also i believe that the thing doesnt accept bootable usb.