Trouble with Snow Leopard

Question

I tried to update my macbook to Snow leopard and it keeps installing and then restarting and then immediatly installing again. Is there anything I can do or am I screwed?

Answer 1

If you have a backup of your files off the machine, then your fine, else you need to install Snow Leopard on a blank external drive and boot from it to recover your files off the internal drive.
Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Once you have your files off, you can follow this user tip to reinstall Snow Leopard fresh and tweak it for performance.
How to erase and install Snow Leopard 10.6
For Snow Leopard Speed Freaks
To get a copy of your free iLife off the 10.5 disks, run the bundled app installer or use Pacifist from CharlesSoft to extract them. Then Software update and they will be currently updated.
Restoring your Free iLife (iPhoto, iMovie etc)
I do NOT recommend a 10.4/10.5 era machine to be updated any further than 10.6.8, rather consider the machine in it's end of life stage and enjoy the superior 10.6 performance and your PPC based apps working (which won't in 10.7 or 10.8) and save up for buying a new machine in a year or two.
Apple is issuing updates to 10.6, anti-malware is installed in 10.6.8 as well, so enjoy the performance as it goes downhill past 10.7. on older machines.
About 45% of OS X users are on Snow Leopard and likely will remain so until their hardware dies because of many third party programs won't update their verions for 10.7 and later.