What does it mean if the blue screen appears and stays on with no further activity?

My disk failed. Apple store replaced it with a disk with OS X. I tried to load from valid time machine backup. eventually I got a blue screen.

What does this mean and what should I do?

Here is more of this story:

When I picked up my computer after the disk was replaced, I was told I could do a time machine recovery. After about 6 hours the recovery said it had less than a minute to go and was transferring "your" network settings. at 9 hours it said the same thing.

I rebooted DVD to try to reload MAC OS X but it crashed with "INSTALL FAILED MAC OS X could not be installed on your computer Click restart and try again"

I did but it would not boot.

I reloaded the disk utility and and it showed no problems but the next OS X install failed (hung).

I then wrote zeros to all the disk (could not find a reformat command). This went tith out error.

I restarted the OSX install and it appeared to work.

I started the install from time machine again and it hung in the same place. (less than a minute remaining. The completion bar had a sliver of white at the end but was mostly blue)

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