Not that MARS is my niche, but it sounds like a hardware issue. If this is just out of the box, there's always that slight chance that something happened during shipping (something like a cable got loose) - now I don't openly condone openeing the box and checking cables, but it's an option.
If the restore DVD can't partition and mount, which sounds like it can't see the drive at all, I'd suggest a TAC case and get it RMA'd.
