Boot disk trouble, keeps restarting

[chriswd]

So the hard drive in my 3 year old macbook died last week, it was running really slowly and so I tried to restart iTunes and System Preferences wouldn't close no matter how much I tried so I did a hard restart and when it came back on I had the flashing question mark folder. I thought that this was no big deal as I've upgraded my hard drive before, however its proving a little more cumbersome this time because my internal cd drive hasn't been operational for about a year. I have a new hard drive, and I put it in, I'm trying to use an external cd drive in the lab at my school, which puts me in this situation. I press option on startup which allows me to then choose the boot disk, then when I click the boot disk it goes to the gray screen with the apple for a while, shuts down and brings a gray screen back up, then an apple, then shuts down again and stays in this loop. I have my OS install discs, an external hard drive, an iPod (saw something about being able to boot with an iPod), and possibly access to another macbook made around the same time may take some convincing though. Anyone have any ideas as to how to fix my problem?

 

[toolbox]

Are you using the correct restore media for the unit? If you can get a copy of Snow Leopard, this should work on there no problems at all.