Can you see the drive in the BIOS? Are you sure you are not confusing the error with an unreadable or damaged installation CD?
Assuming the drive has been partitioned and formatted, go back through the windows installer and get into the recovery console by pressing R when prompted to do so. Then proceed to type in "chkdsk C: /f /r" and let it run. It will take a few hours if you have a larger drive but it should be able to determine if there are any bad sectors. Assuming the drive is new, I would return it if you are sure it has issues writing to disk