I had this issue this weekend when trying to do a fresh windows 7 install on my desktop and thought I'd share my solution in case any one hits this.
I had previously used the drive as a data drive and decided to make it my main drive. I had detached all other drives from the system and windows would simply say that it couldn't find any drive to install to.
I checked in the BIOS and the drive was found. Changing from IDE to ACHI didn't make any difference.
Even more oddly, if I tried to install a RAID driver from the windows 7 installer, I could see the hard drive in the list of locations to find the driver on!
The fix for me was to reformat the drive. It was already ntfs, and after reformatting to ntfs again, windows 7 found it with no problem. I did my reformat by live booting into Kubuntu 12.04 and using the partition editor in there to do the reformat.
Hope this saves someone else a few hours of their life.