Hard drive Locked, Unable to reinstall

I am trying to re-install Lion after making the ghastly mistake of messing with my HD permissions, completely messing up all my Sytem/library/extension/...Kext files, not that I understand what they are. I did this because I continued to run into permission issues, and naively thought it would solve my problems.
Advice seemed to be that the best solution was to re-install OS, which for me is Lion 10.7.5 running on a iMac 24 inch, early 2009.
I followed the advice in this post:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3531813
That seemed to all go fine, until I get to the part to reinstall the OS, and the HD is unavailble since it is locked.
Any way to unlock it?
Alternatively, if I simply re-booted from the last time machine back up, would that repair the awful damage I did to my disc permissions?
Feel free to dumb your answer way, way down and go through minute details in steps to follow.
Any help, much appreciated.
Cheers, and happy new year.

Wow, thanks. It did the trick. So now I am confused, do you think I still need to take in my Mac to see if there are some problems with the hard drive, or do you think I'm in the clear. I was going to get a new hard drive installed, because I thought that was the issue seeing as I couldn't access it during safe mode.

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Message was edited by: Diamond Dog

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