CMD+R Not Working, Spinning Wheel of Death

Hey All!

My first post here! I"m quite eager to fix this issue that I have & you lot are the only ones that can help!

So then, a little bit of background information.

MacBook (13-inch, Late 2009, Oct 20th 2009)

Processor and memory

2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed

1066MHz frontside bus

5GB (one 1GB+4GB SO-DIMMs) of 1066MHz DDR3

250GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard disk drive;

OS X - Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard (includes Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iSafari, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, DVD Player, Photo Booth, Front Row, Xcode Developer Tools)

iLife ’09 (includes iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, iDVD)

Points to note:

1. It was given to me dead, just the gray screen & apple logo with the spinning wheel
2. Startup time was 10 minutes
3. I managed to do a user profile reset & was able to get to the desktop
4. First time mac user
5. Intermediate PC user
6. I don’t have access to another mac
7. I’m not sure if the cd rom works
8. I installed the RAM and did a lot of disk repairs & brought down the startup time to 3 mins
9. It was still very slow and the beach ball was forever on the screen
10. There is no need for any backup to be done
11. S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive said "Verified". The Repair Disk & Repair Permissions are always doing/fixing things.
12. I’ve tried to make a bootable usb using these instructions: http://superuser.com/questions/383235/create-a-bootable-usb-drive-from-a-dmg-fil e-on-windows
13. One day, its just went back to the gray screen & apple logo.

Things I’ve done so far (& failed)

1. NOT POSSIBLE. Why? Because the CMD+R just takes me back to the apple logo. So I can’t boot to the recovery HDD. I have a Bootable USB. (Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears.)
2. For this, I get a mouse pointer, then a single, lone, square icon named MAC HDD. When I click it, it takes me back to the Apple Logo Spinning Screen (restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
3. I can’t start up so can’t get into the OS
4. I have a new SSD to replace the old one. When I put it in, I get a flashing square question mark.
5. I have an external sata>USB cable. I’ve plugged the MAC HDD into Windows and in disk management, I can see that its still alive and kicking.

What I’m looking at now

1. Safe mode: Apple logo + spinngin wheel + bar at the bottom
2. Disk Utility – fail, nothing happens for cmd+R
3. Single-User Mode – I’m not sure how to use this to help me
4. Recovery Console – not possible cos cmd+R doesn’t work

I want to re-install MAC OS X on the new SSD. Please help!