MacPro won't boot from any disk but the original

We picked up a lightly used MacPro 2 x3.2G Quad Intel Xeon at work. The plan was to remove the internal drive (which is also the boot disk) and replace it with a brand new WD Caviar Black 500G drive with OS 10.5 freshly installed, and then use Migration Assistant to transfer from the old machine.
The problem is that when trying to run the OSX install disc on this new machine, it will restart, but then not boot from the install disc. Rather, the apple logo pops up, it thinks for a bit, then the grey curtain drops and i get the multi-language "you must restart your machine" message.
So, after successfully doing an install of the OS on the fresh drive using a different machine, i put it back into the new one, restarted holding OPT, and selected the fresh OS drive. I get the same multi-language message, and the machine will not boot. I've tried installing the OS on a different HD as well, to the same results.
The new machine will restart using the startup disk (internal HD) that came with it and will run Apps, etc. To confuse things further, i pulled my startup HD out of my personal tower at home (also running OS 10.5, but it's been updated to 10.5.8), stuck it in the new machine, and tried to reboot from that. This DID work (normal time startup, apps work, etc).
I thought this might be a HD problem, but now it seems like a machine problem. Maybe it doesn't like the OS install? I dunno.. Thoughts?
I just had one. I'll try to clone my HD/OS from my personal computer to the new WD 500G drive, and if that works, i'll just go from there...maybe i just had to type this out to think of something different to try, but i'll post it anyways...

So you're saying essentially that this new machine, when it came out of the Apple factory, had OS 10.5.x installed on it, and because that was the original install, it won't recognize something that has OS 10.5.0, even if that install is on a fresh HD? Basically the hardware inside the tower can't/won't recognize any OS prior to the original 10.5.x factory install?
well, if that's the case, then 1)that's ridiculous of Apple to do, and 2)it makes this whole problem make more sense, and it's good future knowledge for me to have.
I cloned my personal OS (but not the users, docs, etc) and stuck that in the new tower, and it works well so far. I'm in the process of copying files to other internal drives, and i'll be using Migration Assistant to transfer users from our old system to the new one, and if all still works fine after that, i think we'll be good to go. So, based on what you've told me about the factory OS install, etc, i think we're on the right track.
Thanks very much for your input!

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