Stuck "loading installation information"

My mbp of 4 years had been dragging over the last year since I upgraded to lion. I'd read a fresh reload could possibly fix it. I backed everything up and got some advice that said all I needed to do was go to the disk utility erase the HD do a verify disk check and then have it reload. I did all of the above and now I'm stuck.

I've tried reloading lion twice using wifi and letting it sit for 4 hours each. Then I tried plugging it directly into the ethernet and let it sit for 8 hours. All three times I'm met with the spinning wheel and it hanging at "loading installion information" and no indicator if its working or what might be wrong.

I've erased my hard drive, I've verified the HD is still good but now I'm not sure what's left to do or what I'm not doing. In the DU filed I have 160gb fujitsu hd, below that lists the name of my partition, below that is the super drive (but its greyed out) then below all of that under a line there's a Disk 1 and under that is the max os x base. I'm assuming that's the lion boot information.

I attempted to wipe out the partition and reload that but It wouldn't let me. I'm stuck! Can some one please point me int he right direction?

Thanks

Josh

I'm not sure what you mean by reload. You want to install a fresh Lion OS? I'm really not sure running disk utility to wipe your drive while Lion is booted is the correct procedure.

To install Lion, you either need Snow Leopard installed first and then install from the App Store
OR
Create a Lion bootable flash drive

But this is coming from someone who never upgraded to Lion, so beware :-D

The proper way to reinstall Lion is to boot the machine to the Lion Recovery partition (Command + R). From the Recovery partition you can erase the drive, format it and then connect to the Apple server and re-download Lion and let it install itself.

If you destroyed the Lion Recovery partition you can install Snow Leopard again and update to Lion from the Mac App store. Make sure your hard drive is OK. Use your Snow Leopard DVD to run Disk Utility and verify the drive before attempting to install Lion. From your description above, it sounds like your hard drive probably should be replaced. That could be the reason for all the slowness.