Chosen Solution
You can use any 2.5" SATA hard drive on your machine, and a 500GB drive should work just fine. For your money, a larger drive is the better deal, unless you can pick up a 120GB on eBay or CraigsList for $30 or so. What happens when you try to load the OS? Does the machine power on and boot off of the reinstall media, but the OS load fails somewhere in the process? Let us know exactly what happens. Knowing this is what will help determine the state of the laptop in general, which is important, because you don’t want to start buying parts for a machine unless you’ve first ruled out a bad logic board. If the battery won’t charge, 95% of the time it’s just a bad battery. I’d borrow a known-good one from a friend in order to verify this.
