Spinning Wheel crashes at start up, Not an error with actual hard drive.

I recently bought a second hand macbook pro 2009. The guy told me it worked fine but you couldn't update the Operating System. I was okay with this because we agreed it must be a hard drive issue and i wanted to replace it with a 1tb SSHD anyway. I tried to enter disk utility to wipe the original 160gb hard drive, but like the guy said, the spinning wheel would just crash. So i installed my new 1000tb SSHD and the exact same thing happen, i insert a Mavericks USB, hold Option, click on the bootable USB and the spinning wheel starts and then stops.

The only way i was able to wipe the 160gb using disk utility was doing it through my iMac and having the Macbook in Target mode.

I know it's not a hard drive issue, as i bought three of these SSHD's and the other two worked fine. Would it be the hard drive cable or something else?

Thanks.