How do I reinstall Snow Leopard on an erased MacBook?

I think I did something stupid. I used the Disk Utility Tool from a booted Snow Leopard installation disk to erase my Mac partition. I needed to erase all old data. My Windows XP partition works fine. My previous Mac partition still exists but has nothing on it. At first I thought the installation disk was bad. However, I have gotten through about 10 minutes of the installation several times, but I keep getting an error saying it is unable to copy files for the installation. I have used the booted installation Disk Utility to repair the partition a couple of times and everything runs OK. I no longer have the orignial restore disks so that is out as an option unless I can find them or some to borrow that happen to match this MacBook. Again, the machine was running fine until I decided to do a clean installation the way I did. I have since discovered from the Apple Web site that I should after run the installation from the same session where I zero-erased the partition. Thanks. In over 20 years of using and supporting Macs I have not seen this problem before.

Lyssa:
Thanks for your quick response. I am sorry for taking so long to give feedback. You were sort of right, but I never could boot from a different optical drive. However, your idea reinforced an idea we have been kicking around.
With firewire, I teathered my MacBook Pro (with Snow Leopard) to the leopardless MacBook. (Remember the MacBook did have two functioning partitions and the Boot Camp partition was working fine. The Mac partition had been erased.)
With the MacBook off, I booted the MacBook Pro and inserted the Snow Leopard installation disk. Then I powered on the MacBook while holding down the T key. The two MacBook partitions jumped up on my MacBook Pro and I started the installation from disk to the troubled MacBook Mac partition. The installation was quick and flawless.
I still don't know if my built-in DVD drive has a problem. It might.
Whatever the cause, now it works. Thanks for sharing your ideas and giving me a push to try some other out-of-the-MacBook solutions.
-- JM

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