IMac Hard drive hardware problem

I have been having problems with my iMac. Running the disc utility is shows a problem with the hard drive which it can't repair so advises reformatting the drive. Though I can erase the volume I cannot run erase on the disc itself it comes back with the following message.
'This drive has a hardware problem that can't be repaired
Back up as much of the data as possible and replace the disk. See an authorised Apple dealer for more information,
The machine was tuning Lion OS but was shipped with Snow-Leopard, luckily I have a recent time machine backup on my time capsule. So restore should be straightforward, install from snow-leopard OSX disc and then run restore from time machine.
Question is, is it possible to reformat drive, if so how do i do that as disc utility isn't able to access drive or do I need to replace. How easy is it to replace a hard drive on a iMac.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Michael,

Disk Utility can only perform  'Erase' on a drive on which it is NOT installed. It can't erase its own drive.
You need to perform the operation from another instance of Disk utility such as booting from the original 10.6 DVD and using its disk utility on the DVD to erase the HD drive in the computer.

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