Hard drive not showing in Recovery Mode?

My friend's laptop that is running Lion refuses to start. It gets stuck on the loading screen. I tried booting into recovery mode to re-install Lion but the only drive that appears to install the operating system onto is the recovery mode partition itself. The main harddrive shows up using recovery mode's disk utility, but it can't be modified in any way. Trying to reformat it returns an error message saying "Failed to unmount disk" or something like that.
Any help would be appreciated!
I have another thread with this topic that has more infomation here:
Macbook stuck on load screen, recovery mode unhelpful?

Does the drive show up in Disk Utilities? Try a restart. Are you getting any error messages?
http://superuser.com/questions/449534/osx-cant-create-a-partition-because-drive- is-locked

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