Need to wipe hard drive, Lion Recovery not working

I've been having problems with this mac and want to completely wipe my hard drive and only put on the Lion operating system, my itunes music, iphoto folders, and a few folders that are already backed up on an external hardrive. My cd-rom drive doesn't work, so I need to use the online Lion Recovery to safely reinstall lion after I clear my hard drive. When I restart and hold down CMD-R, it doesn't bring me to the Lion Recovery/Disk Utility window. It only shuts down after a while. I've tried this many times and I'm not sure why I can't get into the partition so I can reinstall Lion without using a disk. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you could tell me exactly how to put on the select items above (not an entire system backup) that would be great. I just need a complete computer makeover because it's a 2008 macbook pro and its been slowing down a lot. Thanks!

chelseafromva wrote:
My cd-rom drive doesn't work
When I restart and hold down CMD-R, it doesn't bring me to the Lion Recovery/Disk Utility window. It only shuts down after a while.
...it's a 2008 macbook pro and its been slowing down a lot.
Well by the sounds of it you have a hardware problem of some sort, perhaps not.
Your going to need a friends Lion Mac and Admin access to do this trick to copy thier Recovery HD to a USB thumb drive
http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/08/lion-recovery-disk-assistant-tool-makes-external- lion-boot-recovery-drives/
https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433
Once you have that you can option boot off the Recovery USB and wipe your entire drive (use the Disk Utiilty > Erase and one selection from the right to securely erase and map off failiing sectors, takes longer but better for your drive and data), then install Lion from Apple's servers with your Apple ID and password.
Setup with the same User name (different password ok) if you want to preserve your iTunes playlists, next hook up your storage drive and return files into their old Music, Pictures etc folders.
No settings will be transfered or anythng else, you set up everything fresh and new again, aka "Erase and Fresh install method" of #20 here
Step by Step to fix your Mac
Later you should be looking at making a option key bootable clone with Carbon Copy Cloner to another blank external drive, this way you can boot off of it and reverse clone in case of problems.
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