A four year old iMac

Good Morning,
How can I unlock the Recovery HD on my  4-5 year old iMac? Below are the steps I have gone through.
Just about when the extra extended warranty was about to run out the iMac Superdrive quit. I thought I had a few months left of extended warranty but I did not!
Last week this iMac was running slow, pages would take forever to load.
I decided to put as many of my files on an external hard drive.
Then I rebooted holding down the command and R key opening Disk Utility and secure erase my hard drive. This took a few hours.
After this was completed I got out of Disk Utilities and went above and clicked on Reinstall OS X which was OS X Mountain Lion clicked continue, clicked agree before installing OS X Mountain Lion. Now this window came up "OS X Mountain Lion select the disk where you want to install OS X.
Recovery HD 650 MB total. 155.5 ava or Macintosh HD 319.21 GB total.318.79 GB. Then I noticed that only the Macintosh HD was my install choice because the Recovery HD was paled out and I could not click on it.
When I did click on the paled out Recovery HD it would tel me that "This Disk is Locked".
Now I clicked on Macintosh HD and pressed install, now I put in my Apple ID and Password and pressed Sign In.
Then a window appeared "This item is temporarily unavailable. Try again later. Well, I must have done this at least ten times.
I phoned Apple and they told me that this Mac OS X Mountain Lion is no longer available in the Apps Store.
I should click on the Recovery HD icon and install. This is where it reads "This disk is locked."
I would really like to use this iMac.
Any ideas?
Thank you.
Abi

Hi Babowa,
I just rebooted holding the Command + Option + R, erased Macintosh HD.
Below is what I see on the Disk Utility after the erase.
Mount Point : /Volumes/Macintosh HD
        Format : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Owners Enabled ; Yes
Number of Folders : 3
Capacity : 319.21 GB (319,213,174,784 Bytes)
Available : 318.79 GB (318,788,182,784)
      Used : 425 MB (424,992,768 Bytes)
Number of Files : 2
I still can't go any further.
If only my internal SuperDive was working I could put in the original CD.
Please any advice and I will try to make this iMac work!
I hate to throw it out.
Abi

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