Beach Ball of Death, Dark Gray Screen after Clean OS ReInstall- Please Help

Question

My 13" MBP is less than two months old.
I read online somewhere that a company that buys large quantities of Macs has a strategy for combating the industry standard 5% hard drive failure in new notebooks. It said something along the lines of performing a clean install / reformat of OS X was a good idea to see if any problems arise- then the HD would likely have problems in the near future, etc...
Being the nerd that I am I performed a clean install on my MBP. I had just performed one the day before on my other Mac (which worked perfectly).
First of all, my MBP took roughly 15 minutes to boot from the disk (to begin the reinstall). Actually one time I gave it over 20 minutes and it never did load. Once I finally got to the Language select screen it froze, clicking the continue arrow did nothing and I couldn't even choose another language. So I shut down and tried again. The DVD doesn't look scratched. Is my drive less than stellar?
This time, it worked, albeit, it took much longer to install than my lesser powered Mac Mini. OS X notified me that the installation was successful and that it now simply needed to restart. Upon restart I was greeted with a dark gray screen and mouse cursor spinning beach ball (that responded to trackpad).
Shut down, turned it back on- same thing. Tried a bunch more times, no luck.
Called Apple Care and after a few questions / tips we concluded that it needed to be sent in, the associate imagined it was a HD problem.
I took my MBP to a local authorized service provider and they took it, and called me back in a few hours. I asked what they did to fix it, and they skillfully dodged the question. They said it should be good now, that it passed all hardware tests, but to let them know if it happened again.
Since then it's been running okay. As a nerd it's a bit bothersome to know that I can't perform a clean install when I see fit- and that if I did, I'd have to take it into Apple Care again in the future, and once Apple Care runs out than a clean install just isn't an option.
It boots up just as fast, but when it gets passed the white screen with the Apple logo... when the desktop is loading I noticed that it stays at the flash of the solid blue desktop a bit longer than usual (the second before it loads your desktop bg image). It also seems that fully loading all of the top right menu bar items takes a bit longer than before.
Also, not sure if the hard drive's sudden motion sensor is going haywire. But randomly, the hard drive will make a singular faint "thud / click" noise. Very faint. But it's not your usual "reading data from the HD" hard drive thrashing noise you hear when you open an app / file. It's a single, more sudden noise, but like I said it is fairly quiet- I hear it when I have literally nothing running except this Safari window. This is something I didn't notice the first few weeks with the MBP.
Also in system profiler, the battery's condition was never good, but only "Normal." I did calibrate my battery one of the first days I had it.
Here's some coconutBattery info:
Current Battery Capacity: 5588 mAh
Original Battery Capacity: 5770 mAh
Which is 96%.
Load cycles: 10
Anyways, curious if anyone has any ideas about my inability to perform a clean install and successfully boot up? I don't see any reason why it should have taken THAT long to boot from the disk, frozen in several random spots throughout, and then not be able to boot up.
The HD noises aren't a huge deal just a bit concerning, and admittedly the battery info is just nerdy paranoia. Just curious what's going on with my MBP. Is there anything I can do, or should read?

Answer 1

Hi simplecoder13,
I perform a similar process on all the HDs that I buy, only I take it a step further. I'll run a single pass erase on drives under 500GB and a seven pass erase on drives larger than 500GB and ones that are deemed "mission critical." Here's an interest metric, though.
Since 01/01/10 on laptop drives (Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi)
+HDs purchases - 461+
+Drives > 500GB - 119+
+Drives < 500GB - 342+
+Drives that fail zero test - 13+
+Drives that pass zero test, fail within 30 days - 2+
+Drives that pass zero test, fail within 60 days - 0+
+Drives that pass zero test, fail within 90 days - 3+
+Drives that pass zero test, fail within 180 days - 4+
+Total drive failures within 6 months - 22 (4.77%) ~ 5%+
I don't have a manufacturer break down, I suppose I should start logging that more closely. Anyway...
I have a new MacBook Pro (13" @ 2.4GHz) and booting off the installation disc, from selecting the installer disc via the boot manager to the language selection screen is ~ 6 mins and 44 seconds. I use that as an average, I did it over 10 restarts but it was a pretty fair assessment. The fact that the installer is freezing is definitely cause for alarm, that's not normal or to be expected. Process of elimination would tell me the following:
1.) The disc is bad
2.) The optical drive is bad
My understanding of the installer is the HD isn't initially accessed during the installer until you choose an install location (at which point it's mount point is verified).
Regarding the battery, your full charge capacity is going to bounce around the first couple of months, usually anywhere from 250-400 mAh. I noticed sporadic reporting until I reached the 50 cycle mark (or around 6 months based on usage). That being said, I don't see any problems or cause for alarm with the information you've reported.