I cannot erase or partition new MB Air SSD drive

I have a two month old MB Air which was delievered with Snow Leopard and since upgraded to Lion at the AppStore.
Five days ago it turned itself off because of low battery power and it would not start up again even after 1 hour of charging the battery. I heard the system open but the screen was black. Finally, on the fourth restart, I just typed in my password into a black screen and it started and came back to life, but everything is completely messed up. No permissions repair because of an SUID error. No ability to erase the disk and reinstall the software (all grayed out). No ability to partition the solid state drive (all grayed out). Reinstalling LION on top of existing system does zero to improve the situation.
Does anyone know how I can get the SSD to erase or partition and do a clean install from the LION dmg I have (or go back online to download it again?)
To make things worse, I just opened the thumbnail drive with the system recovery software that came with the NEW MB Air and it isn't even recognized as a drive on this computer, or on a 3-day-old MB Pro I had to buy out of desperation while the MB Air is out of order, or on my 2-year-old MINI. Now when your new computer dies, that's bad enough, but when the unwrapped and untouched Recovery thumbnail drive won't mount on ANY computer, that is insult to injury.
So far from Apple, bring it in for service. But I am in France for a month and I cannot deal with the French Apple store people in Paris because of language problems and this is "vacation time" in France which means come back in September.
Does anybody know how to FORCE this thing to erase or partition so I can try to correct the problems? I am at a loss here.
Thank you.
Mike

Hello Leigh
Thank you for the information. I was hoping to avoid installing Snow Leopard 10.5 which would then have to be updated with a 1gb update to 10.6 BEFORE it could be upgraded to LION. I am in France in the country on holiday and using a low bandwith and high cost internet connection. C'est la vie. There was no way to get the Lion dmg file to give me any options whatsoever to use Utilities to access the Disk Utilities and erase the disk. Just never appeared. The full dmg in fact reverted to the internet to download files and the estimated time was four hours. Perhaps after that four hours I would have been given an option to erase and install "clean" but I didn't get that far.
The thumb drive with OS 10.5 never showed up in the finder or in Disk Utilities.
I am working through it now and I hope to be finished in two hours.
Moral of the Story: Never let your computer shut down automatically because it is out of battery power. Disaster.
Thank you.
Mike

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Ok, I have a new MacBook Air running Lion (bought last year), a MacBook Pro running Leopard which is approx 4 years old and a Windows Laptop. I use the MacBook Air for Work and when travelling (weekly with work), the MacBook Pro for home and managing my other apple devices (iPad/iPhone etc..). I no longer use the PC, but there are loads of files both work and home, I wish to keep on an external HD for use with both Apple Laptops.
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