Trouble installing snow leopard after hard drive replacement

My imac hdd died last weekend. And the replacement hdd came in today.
I went through all the steps in this guide https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+21.5-Inch+EMC+2389+Hard+Drive+Replacemen t/6284 And I am pretty sure I did it all correctly.
However, after plugging my imac back up it gave me a flashing folder with a question mark. I took this as it asking for a os disk to install with so I put my snowleopard disk into the imac. The folder with the question mark turned into the apple logo.....and that's it. It just stays on the apple logo and nothing happens. I tried leaving it like that for a good hour. But nothing changed.
What am I doing wrong? My imac is a mid 2010 model (emc 2389). I'm pretty sure the included os on it was Leopard. Do I need to try and find my Leopard disk that was in the box? I'm not sure where it is and all I have at hand is my Snow Leopard installation disk. And if I do need to use Leopard, how would I do that if I can't find the disk my imac came with?

With the Snow Leopard DVD in the drive, Restart the Mac while holding down the "C" key. It will then boot from the DVD drive, a slower process for sure, but not more than a few minutes. Once booted, you can use Disk Utility to verify that the new internal drive is formatted properly, GUID. Some new drives come pre-formatted as something else.

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