IMac won't boot after replacing hard drive and restoring from Time Machine

I was having problems with my iMac but upgraded to Lion when it came out. Had a few good days and then my hard drive died.
I had the drive replaced and the repair people put Snow Leopard on the new drive.
I then tried to restore everything from my Time Machine backup. At first when I tried to log on the computer wouldn't accept my password (i know it was right).
I decided to reinstall again using the snow leopard dvd i had. This time, the computer booted up (didn't ask me for a passord) and looked like it was in the process of setting things up. But Mail kept saying it was going to import messages but then quit and restarted a few seconds later. When i quit it it just came back again and again. I could see Chrome open behind it with my bookmarks in the toolbar and see other restored things, but the overall look was grey and not everything was there.
When i restarted from the HD and not the dvd i could never get past various shades of grey and the circling progress indicator. Never booted up at all.
I read about Lion having some restore hd functionality but it doesn't show up when i restart with option key. Am I in limbo between operating systems?
Any advice as to steps to take? I don't know much about this stuff.
Thanks for any help.

Yes, if you picked a Snow Leopard backup, that's what you got.
You could pick a Lion backup, and it would restore it, but that wouldn't create the Recovery HD, which you will need, sooner or later. See Using the Recovery HD. You'll need to re-download Lion for that to be created.
When you do that, after downloading but before installing Lion again, you might want to do this: Making a Lion Install disc or partition. Then if you need to reinstall Lion again, you can do it from that, instead of having to download it again.

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wsev1955 wrote:
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Originally when I received a folder with a flashing question mark upon startup, I assumed I had a failed hard drive. I went ahead and installed a new 500GB hard drive in my machine and installed OS X Snow Leopard. I upgraded to OS X Mavericks, and I had everything running properly. The next day, I went to startup and my Mac would not boot again. The dreaded folder and question mark were back.
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IMac won't boot after replacing hard drive and restoring from Time Machine

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