MacBook Pro installation failure (recovery, internet, or disk)... what now?
Appears to have been a bad memory module. I swapped in a known good hard drive (with OS already installed) with no success, reset PRAM (which restored startup sound) but didn't help the boot process. However, as soon as I pulled the RAM and replaced with a known good pair of DIMMs it booted right up. (Unfortunately that also means I went from 8 GB to 2 GB RAM - so I think I'll be placing an order for an upgrade!)