Impossible to Restore - MBP

I was very lucky when I went to visit the family this year that I was able to convince my brother to trade his 15.4" i5 for my 13" core2duo. A HDD swap later and I was up and running.

Now I want the OS to fully use every hardware piece at its max potential so I want to do a OS Clean Install. However, when I try to boot from DVD I have no luck. I am using the MBP 2.4Ghz i5 with everything standard except a 640GB HDD. The OS discs I have tried are the one that came with the 15" mac, brand new retail copy of 10.6.3 SL, and a copy of 10.5 leopard.

I can read the discs when running the OS, but when i restart booting from disc (whether I use the 'option' key on startup or boot into the OS then load the DVD to restart) all I get is the light gray-off-white screen and the apple LOGO, no loading wheel or anything. Nothing ever loads even after 30 minutes. I thought maybe it would be my HDD so I swapped in another HDD and tried it, but no luck. I then tested my official HDD in another mac and that mac booted from disc just fine.

I then decided to remove the RAM and reinstall it, and also reset the PRAM, and yet nothing changes. I don't get any Kernal Panic errors or anything.

I am taking it to Apple tomorrow but has anyone gone through something like this or have any idea what could be going on?

had this happen to me.

Your build date is too new for ANY of those discs to work (SL retail, 10.6.3, whatever).. are you 100% the discs he gave you were from that computer when he purchased it?

Yah I am positive. It's just such a weird issue since my old mac desktop and macbook will read the discs fine. I will make sure and post tomorrow what Apple has to say about this little issue.

But yah if there is anything anyone can think of I would love to figure this out and not drive an hour to the Apple store.

this caused me to visit two apple stores, an applecare phone tech session, and the only luck i had was the most awesome Genius giving me the restore discs from a returned (same exact spec) macbook pro (I had recently lost my discs).

Watch out.. apple sent me the wrong disc TWICE...

good luck.

So I'm updating to archive this problem... The Apple store found that my original restore disks were bad (musta made some low quality batches) so I have to contact apple care to get replacements.

The other discs won't work because my bootloader is too new even for 10.6.3 snow leopard discs which I think is apples way of making sure people don't buy the $30 retail disc to use for restores. I hate this but that's business.

They did however offer to use their disc and do a clean install for free which I am now waiting to finish before I take it home so kudos there for customer service!

yup, just as I had assumed