Is installing software in Snow Leopard REALLY this problematic

Question

I updated my 2007 Mac Pro to Snow Leopard earlier this week. After doing so I decided to install iLife 11, which proved to be entirely impossible despite trying an assortment of suggestions here in the support community as well as elsewhere. Every attempt at install came up with t=with the "install failed. Consult manufacturer". In years of installing a multitude of software to various MAc OSs I have never seen that error
So after much futility I took a brand new drive and installed Snow Leopard on it and made this my new boot drive and decided I would cleanly install my various software. I was then successful at installing iLife. However, everything else I try to install gives me that annoying failure message for no apparent reason. And I'm talking about standard and up to date stuff including APPLE'S own products like Final Cut Studio. It's a brand new drive. Brand new OS install. No plugins loaded yet . . . I have run all the Disk Utility options and all checks out. I've repaired permissions. I've tried installing under a new Administrator account and nothing works.
Is this common for Snow Leopard? I've never even remotely had these kind of problems before. And glancing around here it appears that install issues are pretty frequent in Snow Leopard. I'm at the point where I am considering by a new Mac Pro because I was contemplating such an upgrade anyway.
However, I am afraid that shelling out the 4+ grand isn't going to help because the problem isn't the machinery but the Snow Leopard OS itself.
So my question is, is there something I am missing or doing wrong? Can I rely on Snow Leopard? I have my old drives backed up and could theoretically simply go back to Leopard, and can do that though I would prefer not to. And what if I do get a new machine? I obviously can't buy one with the old OS.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

nlbford wrote:
It's a completely clean install etresoft - and sorry if I started us off on the wrong foot.
No problem. It is where you end up that is important.
I've been trying to get the machine to start up in teh diagnostic mode that Thomas suggested, but for some reason it will not boot in that mode off of that disk.
That's not good at all. If it won't even run hardware diagnostics, consider those diagnostics to have failed.
But my next step will be to do as you suggest and see what the install log says. Thanks.
That can't hurt, but I think you have some kind of hardware problem. Since you are probably out of warranty by now, let's try a little harder.
Since this machine was on 10.4 and now you are trying to install 10.6, you missed a little something called 10.5. During all that time, you may have missed one or more firmware updates too. A Snow Leopard installer may assume that all of those firmware updates have been applied. See if any of these updates look applicable to your system: http://support.apple.com/downloads/#macpro
The one that looks most interesting to me is the Hard Drive Update 1.0. Also, there are a number of Repair pages (lower right corner) for your machine that require a hardware serial number to search. Enter your serial number and see what comes up.
Message was edited by: etresoft
Also, you might want to post a new topic in the Mac Pro forum: http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=194
Include a link to this topic so people can see what you are talking about. Maybe someone else who has the same machine might be more familiar with the issue.