Cannot format hard drive and do a clean install

I'm in a pretty big mess right now. I was using boot camp with lion and Windows 7 no problem and I wanted to edit the sizes of the partions. It didnt go so well and I ended up losing both operating systems. Now the big problem is when I boot up from the recovery partion I cannot do any sort of formating from the disk utility, it always give me some sort of error. When I try to install lion via web there is no partion that I can Install it to. I can install Windows no problem from a USB drive whcih I have done already. When managing the disk in windows I see 2 of the windows partions, the mac recovery partion, and an 80 GB partition that I can format but I cannot do anything else with. I dont have any images or recovery devices other than the recovery partition. I need some advice on how to get the drive back to mac format so I can re install lion.

From the disk utility every time I would try to format the partitions or resize anything it would say cannot unmount disk and there was another error I cant remember. I think I'm on the right track though. What I've managed to do so far is with the disk utility on the recovery partition, I formated a usb drive and then installed Lion on that drive. The drive is painfully slow but it seems to be working. Where I am at now is I have booted from the the flash drive and managed to Format the Hard drive back to mac format and I am now creating an image of the USB stick that I can hopfully copy to the hard drive. Creating the image is taking a while due to the crappy transfer rate of the USB stick.
If you have any suggestions of where to go next or what to do I would appreciate it.

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Cannot format hard drive and do a clean install

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