Re-Installing Snow Leopard Nightmare

Having had a rocky year using Snow Leopard with regular crashes and slow running programs I have now (since updating to 10.6.6) had a complete system failure. I booted up from the System DVD supplied with the machine and ran the disk utilities which showed a mammoth list of bad disk permissions, the disk utilities program was unable to fix these and stated that the only course was to erase the disk and re-install the system software. I erased and started the re-install which failed a third of the way through saying that the support files could not be copied so the installation has failed, I tried re-installing several times but the install would not work. I found some posts on a few sites with similar issues which said the issue was with the Optical drive not being able to correctly read the dual layer DVD, the suggestion was to create a install disk on a flash drive, which I have done, this to has failed for the same reason.
I have now Zero erased the hard drive, checked it for problems and still it will not install. Anyone got any bright ideas?
Thanks
Mark

LittleBigIdeas wrote:
ran the disk utilities which showed a mammoth list of bad disk permissions
Welcome to Apple's discussion groups.
That may be normal:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
stated that the only course was to erase the disk and re-install the system software.
That makes me wonder if you're mixing a message from a "permissions repair" operation with a message from a "disk repair" operation. I' haven't noticed a "permissions repair" recommend a system reinstall.
I have now Zero erased the hard drive, checked it for problems and still it will not install.
If in Disk Utility you select the boot drive (not volume), what do you see for "S.M.A.R.T." status at the bottom of the window?

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