Discussed with the other tech and we decided to stop messing with this for now (it's a customer's computer, so we don't want to keep it longer than we quoted).
We think that the problem lies in the system recognizing the new disk and will experiment later on with setting up the blank disk as GPT, partitioning the GPT disk, and formatting the partitions (along with a slew of DISM and DISKPART commands).
Will post more the next time that we get one in.
