iMac won't start after hard drive replacement

Read a few of the options but haven’t seen my situation -

Replaced my Hard drive in my iMac early 2009 2267 -. Followed tutorial and everything seemed to go fine…

New Hard drive; western digital 2TB / Blue

Upon starting I get a flashing question mark / did some research on this and it seems pretty logical it can’t find the OS .

Went ahead and created USB boot disk (I no longer have the original DVDs); Upon startup it shows me “install Mac OS High Sierra” - as I expected but there are no more drives listed. Just an “up” arrow. In some of the research i’ve seen it’s supposed to show me the new WD drive I just installed (could it not be found?) I click the “Up” arrow and I get a circle with a line thru it - a few seconds later the screen goes black and system shuts down.

Can’t get past this image when trying to boot from thumb -> once I click the up arrow a circle comes up with a line thru it and the system shuts down. Any thoughts?