How can I downgrade 10.7 to 10.6 without an optical drive?

I got a mac mini with Lion on it. It's not compatible with certain software I have to have on it. I need to downgrade it to 10.6 but it has no optical drive. When I use an external drive, I can't boot from the disc. I've made a .dmg of the file on a GUID partitioned external HD and mounted the .dmg. No dice. Did the same thing on an Apple partitioned drive. Still no dice. I even went through making a .dmg of another mac mini, slightly different configuration but had 10.6 to try and use restore after the .dmg was mounted. Nothing. The restore appeared as though it worked because the startup disk I chose when exiting the "recovery drive" said it was 10.6. Only problem was the mac wouldn't boot once 10.6 was restored to the HD. So I'm super frustrated that I paid $750 for a machine I can't use. Any ideas. Anyone?

I haven't had the pleasure of working with the new Mac Minis yet, so I don't know if you can hold down the 'c' key to get it to boot off of the external optical drive or not.  (I would think you should be able to still.)  Though, Mooblie is correct, Apple generally does not support an OS prior to what was shipped on the Mac for the Mac in question.  However, that doesn't mean you can't get it to run, but you may have difficulty doing a traditional install (boot from CD and install direct).  If you have another Mac to work with you could try booting the Mini in target disk mode (hold "command-t" at power on until you see the firewire logo come up) over firewire, and then either use CarbonCopyCloner to copy the an existing system over, or install direct to the Mini's HD.  I have had success with this sort of approach in the past when I wanted to have 10.4 on my Intel Mac Mini that didn't ship with it. 
I would be very surprised if 10.6 couldn't run the new Mini's as there haven't been any segnifcate changes that 10.7 would be needed for.  However, you will want to use the latest version of 10.6, so using CCC might be the best approach.

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