There is some information missing in the first post.
We need to know something about the history of his computer .This can make a difference. Is this a laptop? Has there been any hardware errors with this computer?
Assuming that it's a desktop, and not a laptop there is an easier way to get to the heart of the problem. You just stick in a fresh, clean hard drive and tried to install to the fresh clean hard drive. If that works, then you know that there was something wrong with the old hard drive or maybe the partition table had been corrupted.
The only reason I mention this is because I have had this kind of problem before when trying to do installation of anything on a hard drive that gave me trouble before. Sometimes the hard drive is flaky, but in some cases the partition table has been really messed up by some other programs or operating systems.