Why can't I install Snow Leopard on my videos hard drive?

I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives. Lion is on the primary drive but I need Snow Leopard for a legacy app. My plan is to install Snow Leopard on a hard drive that I use for video projects, and then restart from that drive when I need to use the old app. The problem is that the Snow Leopard installation disk says that it can't install onto the videos hard drive unless I partition the hard drive, which will erase all the data. Why can't it install onto the videos hard drive? There's no operating system on that hard drive. The hard drive has folders for Final Cut Express Projects, iMovie Events, iMovie Projects, DVDs movies I've ripped, a folder of music, and an iDVD project. What do I need to remove to enable installing Snow Leopard?

If I understand what you are saying you have a drive with "stuff" already on it and you want to install a version of OSX on to it while still retaining that "stuff".  If that's what you want to do you cannot do that mainly because there's already "stuff" on that drive.
The only way you can do this is to either of the following:
a. Copy the "stuff" off that drive to another drive.  Install the OS.  Copy the "stuff" back on to the newly created boot drive.
b. Copy the "stuff" off that drive on to another drive.  Partition the drive into at least 2 partitions; one for the boot and one for the "stuff".  Install the OS into one of the partitions.  Copy the "stuff" back to the other partition.
Either way, if you want to use that disk for a boot disk, you got to get that "stuff" out of the way to do the OSX install on to that disk.

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