There are two slightly different versions of Recovery you could be invoking. One boots (with Command-R at startup) from the Recovery_HD on your drive, and becomes immediately available.
The other (with Command-Option-R at startup) boots from the Internet, and takes several minutes to get ready before you can do anything. It shows a globe Icon in the center of the screen while loading.
The two options allow recovery, but of different versions:
- If you use the Recovery System stored on your startup drive to reinstall OS X, it installs the most recent version of OS X previously installed on this computer.
- If you use Internet Recovery to reinstall OS X, it installs the version of OS X that originally came with your computer. After installation is finished, use the Mac App Store to install related updates or later versions of OS X that you have previously purchased.
from:
OS X: About OS X Recovery - Apple Support
There are also requirements for how your Wi-Fi is set up, including that you MUST get your IP Address using DHCP (otherwise you will not get connected.) If your Wi-Fi is giving you trouble on a Mac that has an Ethernet port, you can move your Mac to the location of the Router and connect it with an Ethernet cable, which is much faster.
You SHOULD be able to boot into Recovery (the one on your drive, NOT the one with the Globe) Use its Disk Utility to erase your drive, and re-install the last-running version of Mac OS X via download. But this has been giving you trouble -- I am not sure why.
Given the difficulty this approach has been giving you, you may not want to proceed to erase your drive in this fashion, without a readily-available re-Installer at hand.
Procedure in my next post ...