Stuck in recovery, I cant re-install lion, I cant select startup disk.

My imac was running terribly suddenly today. So I thought I might try seeing if a re-install of Lion would help. I booted into recovery, downloaded Lion again and proceded with the install. I came back to find it had an error, tried to reboot. It goes right back to trying to install.
After several tries of installing I gave up, ran disk utility, checked the disk, fixed permissions. Tried to select the startup disk to reboot and I cant.

You may need to start from the beginning, start you Mac with the original DVD that came with the computer and then open disk utility, see if your disk shows up in the left window.  If you do not see your hard drive is bad.  If you can see it then you may need to format it then reinstall Mac OS X 10.6 then update to Mac OS X 10.7.  Do you have a Time Machine backup?

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