Cannot install snow leopard from disk?

Hello.
I have an original snow leopard disk.
I want to do a clean install on my  imac also running sl.
So i start up holding c. The disk intially starts but then spin down with the apple logo. I left it this way for 15 minutes and nothing.
In my macbook, it loads straight up as expected.
The drive on the imac seems fine, i burnt an entire dvd with it this morning, and from the desktop the sl disk loads fine.
So what could it be?

If the original Snow Leopard disc you have is the original for another computer it will not work. The discs that come with a computer are machine specific. However if you have an upgrade Snow Leopard DVD that should work OK.
You mention needing to partitioning a Mac's HD is totally unnessary. Can you elaborate on why you need to partition it?

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