Cannot Unmount Internal HD

Hi Guys,
I had a problem booting my computer up a while ago (it would just sit at the white apple screen with the loading wheel) so I removed the internal HDD and backed it up to my desktop computer using a USB adapter hub. I then completely erased the drive. I followed multiple forums on how to create a bootable USB flash drive with Lion, so I did so. I then booted up my computer while holding the Option key, and selected the flash drive (which had the OSX Lion Installer App on it from the mounted installESD.dmg file).
I'm now stuck yet again trying to reinstall Lion on my hard drive. I am in disk utility, and I cannot unmount my internal drive, which means I cannot reinstall lion to it. When I run the reinstaller it tells me that there was an error, and I need to reboot the app, which does nothing.
What i would really love to do is completely erase my internal hard drive (even though I thought it was already) and install Lion onto it from the bootable USB flash drive.
I have an '09 MacBook Pro. I've gone to SmallDog twice with my laptop and they told me that they cannot do anything or that I should do it myself to save money.
And help would be greatly appriciated. Thank you!!
-Julien

There should be a simple explanation. Many background programs on your Mac, including Spotlight, access files on all formatted volumes connected to the computer; most of these programs are designed to allow an in-use volume to be unmounted without causing issue, but one notorious counterexample is the iTunesHelper background process. iTunesHelper coordinates iTunes' interactions with the rest of your computer, and may be using files on your iMac's hard disk, preventing you from unmounting the volume.
If iTunesHelper is running in the background, it's probably causing your issue, so you can just kill it (quit) from Activity Monitor. Search Spotlight for it, or open your /Applications/Utilities folder - you should see Activity Monitor near the top of the list. In the list of processes you see, find and select iTunesHelper and click the "Quit Process" button up top.
Now try running Drive Genius's Defrag again. It should be able to unmount your internal drive and run the repair normally. Just remember to leave your iMac alone while it's defragging! You don't want to accidentally interrupt the process.

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