Clean install of Snow Leopard fails

Question

Dear all,
As the title says my current issue is that I'm unable to perform a new installation of Snow Leopard after performing a single-pass secure erase of the Mac partition of my hard drive. However, some background to the problem is probably useful.
My troubles begin after attempting to transfer files from an USB stick to my Macbook pro. Drag/drop or copy/paste in finder resulted in nothing happening. I ejected the USB drive (which flashed to let me know the drive itself thought it had been ejected) however the USB stick did not disappear from Finder. Further attempts to eject the stick using finder did nothing. Attempting to reset Finder produced the well known "The application Finder.app can't be opened. -10810" error (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2135129&tstart=45). After reading through that thread and trying some of the suggestions I eventualy had to resort to a hard reset of my macbook. After restarting the macbook ran very slowly for a couple of minutes before producing the same Finder error as before (though no external drives/devices were involved this time).
After coming up against the same problem again and again I decided to verify and repair the drive using the OS X installation cd that came with my macbook pro. The hard disk itself seemed ok (S.M.A.R.T: verified), which I expected as I have Windows 7 running under bootcamp on a separate partition. (As a quick aside, Windows 7 was and still is running fine, and in fact I could successfully access and open all the files on my Mac partition from within windows. This allowed me to grad up-to-date copies of all my important files before taking more drastic action.) Verifying the mac partition resulted in a message saying the disk needed repairing. Attempting to repair the disk initially resulted in errors saying a clean install was required, though the repair succeeded on my 4th attempt. This repair failed to fix the problem and I was still getting the very slow running leading quickly to the same Finder error.
Eventually i decided my only option was to perform an erase and install of Snow Leopard. Initially I simply erased the partition using Disk Utility after booting from the install disk (default option) and then attempted to install Snow Leopard. The install failed repeatedly, alternating between 'An error has occured in the installation process' and 'Unable to install supprting files' error messages. I also tried repairing the disk after erasing and then installing with the same errors. I then performed a single-pass secure erase on the Mac partition (again from Disk Utility via the startup disk), verified the drive (finding an unassigned node error), successfully repaired the drive (twice, just to make sure) and attempted another installation, which again failed with the 'An error has occured in the installation process' error.
So I currently have a formatted Mac partition which refuses to accept a new Snow Leopard install and a fully working copy of Windows 7 running under bootcamp on a separate partition of the same disk. Is there anything else I can try other than reformating the entire hard drive and losing my bootcamp installation?

Answer 1

try this idea: Do a leopard install to an external disk then do a Disk Utility "restore" function to that clean partition. So you restore from the external to the internal partition. Should leave Bootcamp untouched.