Windows 7 won't install to new hard drive.

My old hard drive began having problems so I bought a new one. I swapped the drives and booted from the recovery DVD I had from a prior install. After some language and timezone questions, a screen comes up and I select the main button in the middle of the page that says "Install Windows."

The installation process begins and I get an error that says "Windows cannot be installed to disk 0 partition 1."

When I try again, I get to the prior screen and I can see one partition with 100 mb of space and a second partition with the remaining amount of 1TB hard drive. When I tried to install it to the newly created partition (the larger one), it fails and I get the same message.

I read up and found some threads suggesting I open a command prompt and use diskpart to manually partition the disk.

When I do that, I get another error message that I can't really recall but my research last night suggested to use diskpart to basically format the hard drive again. I used diskpart and typed "clean all." When I do so, I get an error message that says "DiskPart has encountered an error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
See the System Event Log for more information."

Could the hard drive be bad? It's a brand new Seagate 1 TB. Any help before I exchange it for a new one?

Kevin

You can boot Seagate Seatools bootable CD to run an extended HD test to find its condition for certain, perhaps repair bad sectors.

If the HD is good use the same disk to do a Quick Wipe and Clean Install Windows 7.

If problems persist enter BIOS setup to reset to defaults, confirm SATA controller is set to AHCI, save changes and exit.

Next try creating an active partititon from Step 2.2 of SSD - HDD Optimize for Windows Reinstallation.