I erased my main drive: how to install Mavericks?

Question

I was running Yosemite Beta on my iMac, but it was acting funny. A dialog told me to back it up and erase and reinstall. I copied the internal drive to a FireWire drive as a clone. Then I booted from the firewire drive. Then I did something very stupid. I erased my main drive, my internal Macintosh HD. I thought I would be able to reinstall the Yosemite beta on my main drive after I booted But now I can't boot up all the way from either of my FireWire drives, which have the proper software on them; they were cloned from the original drive, and worked until I erased the main drive. The boot up process stops about a minute into the process. So how do I get a copy of at least Lion or Mountain Lion or Mavericks on to the main drive? I'm stuck. I don't know how to do that.

Answer 1

Oh, they're clones. Made them with SuperDuper. They boot, but they stopped after I erased the Macintosh HD.
I've found a way to make them boot again, however. I tried safe boot, single user, netboot -- no deal. I found a cd copy I made of Lion, way back, and tried to see if it would mount -- of course it didn't -- but I just tried one more time, went to make coffee, and returned to my first computer screen in two days. It's still kind of working. I wonder if the ROM in my 24", 2.66 Ghz, iMac 9,1, just can't accept a bare drive on the internal bus. Or, it seems that there is something wrong with the drive. I get this message in the Crash log every minute or so.
Oct 15 15:11:35 James-Hassingers-iMac-3.local coreduetd[45]: CoreData: error: (11) Fatal error.  The database at /var/db/CoreDuet/coreduetd.db is corrupted.  SQLite error code:11, 'database disk image is malformed'
Oct 15 15:11:35 James-Hassingers-iMac-3.local coreduetd[45]: Core Data: error: -executeRequest: encountered exception = Fatal error.  The database at /var/db/CoreDuet/coreduetd.db is corrupted.  SQLite error code:11, 'database disk image is malformed' with userInfo = {
   NSFilePath = "/var/db/CoreDuet/coreduetd.db";
   NSSQLiteErrorDomain = 11;
Doesn't sound very good. I'm wondering if I've just gotten a lot of bad sectors. But I'd love to just do an iFixit on it, put in a new 1 TB drive -- I'm not bad with these projects -- and then go from there.