Windows 7 Freezing Upon Installation?

I had built myself a pc, installed win7 (full version) with no problems, and the computer worked for about 40-50 days untill the HDD failed. I headed out, got a good Western Digital HDD and installed the device. I set up the new HDD to be the boot drive (which is what I did with the previous drive) and resetted my PC. When it turned back on, it promted me to install a boot disk, which I did and it loads the windows files and gets past the "Starting Windows" screen with the glowing logo, but gets stuck on the blue wallpaper-ish background screen; the cursor is existing on screen and can move, but has nothing to click on. I tried waiting, and ended up wasting away an hour and 10 minutes. :LI tried reducing the amount RAM, deactivating USB devices; all giving the same results. I eventually got impatiant and opened the disk drive while on the blue screen and as soon as the disk stopped spinning, the selection screen opened. I clicked next and got to the device select screen, but was greeted with a window telling me to insert the boot disk, so I closed the disk drive with disk and it started to read then once again, froze.