Problem updating to Yosemite on Macbook Pro early 2011- Won't boot

Whenever I download Yosemite from the app store and then install, my macbook gets stuck during booting, and in the end I have to restore back to an old version of Lion, essentially reverting back to where I was in the beginning.
I noticed that if I boot using Command-R and use disk utilities I see that there is no drive to boot from, which I assume is why it gets stuck in an endless boot (just an apple logo and a loading bar that gets suck before half way- at about 40%).

Any ideas on what to do in order to upgrade without it all messing up again (I've tried this whole process 3 times now).

Thanks

How can you have no drive to boot from when you say that it reverts back to Lion? Are you able to boot from Lion? And when you use Disk Utility from the Recovery partition, are you checking and verifying the hard drive?