I need help with consequences of failed Lion installation

Because I need to install a software program that requires Lion or higher, I decided to upgrade my Macbook Pro from Snow Leopard to Lion today. I chose Lion rather than Mountain Lion because of the bad reviews I read about Mountain Lion...

The installation failed and I got the message "Hard disk is damaged and can't be repaired."

I can boot the computer in "safe" mode, but not in normal mode.

I do not have the original installation disk that came with the computer, but I tried booting with an installation disk that came with a MacBook. That did not work.

I used target disk mode to connect my Macbook Pro to my old MacBook (that is still running Tiger) and ran Disk Repair from the MacBook, but got these messages : "Missing thread record; Invalid sibling link, volume check failed; the underlying task reported failure on exit"

I don't live anywhere near an Apple Store or any other store that offers Macintosh hardware support.

What are my options? Is this really a hardware problem, or a problem caused by installation of Lion?

I have a Time Machine backup on an external hard drive. Should I purchase a SnowLeopard or Lion bootable disk from Apple? And reformat drive? And then install Lion?

I would really appreciate any insight or advice anyone can give me. I have owned about 25 different macs since 1984, and this is the first time I have had a problem like this 😟