Erased HD, Now Flashing Question Mark - I have Issues!

[greatbarrier]

Hi,
So, I have a Late 2006 Black Macbook. It originally came with OSX 10.4.8 (leopard maybe?) and I have all the original grey install discs. I then got snow leopard and upgraded to that. I am giving the computer to a friend so I erased the HD (so none of my personal info stayed on there) from the Snow Leopard Disc and that went fine. I was then going to reinstall snow leopard so that it was ready for my friend. The first time I tried to reinstall I had to manually shut down as the spinning color wheel wouldn't stop. The second time everything was looking good until 23 minutes left in the download (out of maybe 45 total minutes) the disc just ejected and the download would not continue.

I tried to boot snow leopard several more times to reinstall but the apple would appear with the spinning wheel below it and that wouldn't stop, never got past that screen. I literally left it on for at least an hour and a half. I have held C, OPT but neither of those seem to let me boot and reinstall. A couple times I got the folder with a flashing question mark.

I then tried the original grey install discs and same thing. Would get the apple with the spinning wheel thing below it and sometimes the question mark. Tried holding opt and c.

What did I do wrong? How can I troubleshoot it if I can't get past the screens i describe above? I erased the HD already and that was successful, is that why I get the flashing question mark if I try to reboot without any discs? Could it be my cd/dvd drive not being able to read the disc (the disc doesn't look scratched)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!! Thanks in advance!!!!

 

[Zotaccian]

Slot load drives are very prone to fail or get unusable because of dust. And because the Macs are built the way they are and because the slot load is what it is, you'll have to disassemble the machine to get the drive out and then open the drive itself to clean the lens. Regular drives in PC laptops are much better in this regard, cleaning is easy and most of the time getting them out for replacement is also easy.

Have tried resetting PRAM and SMC before installation (instructions from Apple website) ? I had some troubles once with an iBook when I tried to do a clean install, resetting those two fixed the problem.

EDIT: One option would of course to get atleast 8GB USB stick and a working Mac, create image of the disk and then "export" or whatever it is called to the USB stick, boot and install OS X.