No wifi card

I recently replaced the hard drive in a Gateway T6330u after a tragic accident with a set of stairs. I installed windows vista again and everything seemed to go well except for the wifi card. It does not show up at all. It shows up under "other devices" in device manager, which leads me to believe that it is a driver issue. I have checked for drivers on windows update, coming back with nothing. I also tried all 3 possible drivers on the gateway site, but none of them worked.

Go to device manager, double click on the offending driver and go to the Details tab. List off some of the things you see. That or just Google them. For example, one on my Toshiba here has Hardware Ids : ACPI\TOS620A. A little research reveled that was the motion sensor (HD protection). Sometimes this can give lots of information about the hardware in question, sometimes it's no help what so ever.

An alternative would be to check the card. Physically remove it and get the model numbers and everything off it. This wouldn't be a bad idea either seeing as it was apparently dropped. The card very well could have been knocked loose.

What is the make and model of the card? I assume this is a laptop? Is the card onboard or external? Give me some more info and maybe we can resolve this.

I am interested in knowing what the problem could be I hope he does give more information.

Device Description: Network controller

Sorry guys this is my girlfriend's laptop and I'm not with her so I'm trying to do this over the msn remote assistance, which is very difficult and frustrating.

EDIT: I will be adding more to this stuff

EDIT2: OK things just went from bad to worse we did a hard restart because it was doing all these weird things (trying to video call me etc). Now it won't boot. It POSTs and then instead of booting windows it sits there with a blinking cursor.

EDIT 3:

Location Information: PCI bus 4, device 0, function 0

Physical Device Object Name: \Device\NTPNP_PCI0020

Capabilities: 00000000

Current power state: D3

Display Name: Network Controller

DevNode Status:
01802400
DN_HAS_PROBLEM
DN_DISABLEABLE
DN_NT_ENUMERATOR
DN_NT_DRIVER

Problem Code: 00000001

Install Error: There is no driver selected for device information set or element.

Lower Logo Version: 6.0

blinking curser is always pleasant. download a pendrive linux live version, put it on a flash drive, and boot to that. then see if windows detects your harddrive.

with the driver issue, you have the correct drivers downloaded for it, right? you can always point device manager to them. its a good sign that device manager sees it, no biggie that the driver wasnt found. try installing it manually and let us know what happens

I have just tried that, and it still cannot install the right driver. I also tried selecting the driver from a list of installed drivers through device manager, as I have found that it is atheros, but I could not find the right one.