Disk utility stuck in the middle of system installation

I have just fitted a new solid state hard drive. My old drive is now where my non functioning Superddrive users to be, which is working fine.
I started by giving my new drive one partition with disk utility. That was fine and I began to install OS Lion. The machine restarted.
Then I got a message to say that my disk was damaged and that I should run disk utility. Within the installer programme I went back and clicked on 'Repair disk'. However disk utility reported no problems. So I tried to repartition my drive. This is where the utility got stuck 'waiting for disks to reappear'. Eventually the machine started getting hot, so a hard restart seemed my only option. Soon I was back in disk utility and still there was no reported damage to my drive. Partition restored, (by selecting 'Erase' rather than 'Partition'), I went on with my installation, but this time was told a recovery partition couldn't be created. Back into disk utility, still no damage but the partition 'erase' is trying to restore is taking forever!
What should I do now? It looks like my plans for a faster system are doomed!

I forgot to update you on what has happened since.
I wanted to get back into the system on my old hard drive. Disk Utility was totally stuck and so I hard restarted once more. I seemed to be going round in circles but was glad to see that every time I asked D.U. to repair my new drive it reported that all was well. Eventually, holding down the option key in the vain hope of getting back onto my old drive I found a screen wheere I had the opportunity to start up from the recovery drive, presumeably of my old drive since it had told me it couldn't create one on the new drive.
I followed this and went through the process again. This time it asked me to sign in and get connected to the internet. I soon realised that it was trying to download the install programme which I know takes ages as I did it yesterday. So I quit out of that and was then finally offered the chance of starting up in my old drive.
Running D.U. from my old drive revealed loads of red writing. I'm currently searching for my Disk Warrior CD in the hope that it may be reparable as D.U. doesn't seem to be able to do much.
I can't believe these SSDs are so fragile! They are surely the same technology as the seemingly indestructible flash drives we all carry around on our keyrings and yet I've now had two of these fail me on system installation. Maybe I should just put a flash drive in my computer and have done with it!

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