Disk Erase Failed - Trying to format a new VERTEX 4 SSD

Hi,

My hard drive died on me and I have installed a new SSD VERTEX 4 256GB.

After trying to install OS X 10.8, I was only able to get as far as the Disk Utilities so i could format the new drive. I selected the Drive from the left hand side and then clicked on the ERASE tab from the top options and proceeded to format this brand new drive.

the following error then appeared:
--------------------------------------------
Disk Erase Failed
Disk Erase Failed with the error:

Wiping volume data to prevent future accidental probing failed.
--------------------------------------------

I am kind of stuck and dont know what to do or what I did wrong.
I was trying to install "Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion ISO Untouched" during the process. The MBP was purchased back in 2010 and has 4GB of Ram (Dont know what operating system it had before it died).

Your help is greatly appreciated.

How did you boot your machine? In other words, what did you use to boot it with and then run Disk Utility? You couldn't have done it from Mountain Lion without installing it first and you can not use Disk Utility while the SSD is mounted.

Please clarify what you did and also include the model and year of your Mac.

Briefly... you need to boot your Mac with an install disk; why? Because your old hard drive crashed and you have no way to format the new SSD. The SSD has to be formatted and prepared prior to installing Mountain Lion.

chscag this is one of the main reasons I see for the need to have a USB thumb drive with a bootable version of the operating system. With a new drive, unformatted and no network settings, Recovery on its own is not much use.

You're right Harry, but unfortunately most folks don't bother to make a bootable thumb or flash drive when they install Lion or Mountain Lion.