Debugger panic on snow Leopard install

I just received my refurbished Mac pro today.* It's an early 2008 2x quad, 8g ram, nvidia geforce card, 2x 500g hd's.
*
It came with no OS but I have a snow leopard disk v10.6.3, i put it in, soon as it starts to read the disk it's spits it out and gives me the typical "you need to restart your computer" message, accompanied by:
*
panic( CPU 0 caller 0x558271) "Unable to find driver for this platform: \ "ACPI\".\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1504.3.12/iokit/Kernel/IOIPlatformExpert.cop:1 389
Debugger called: <panic>
Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address (4 potential arts on stack)
0x79f93da8 : 0x21b449 (0x5ce420 0x79f93ddc 0x2238a5 0x0)
0x79f93df8 : 0x558271 (0x5d7d4c 0xb8f24d0 0x79f93e28 0xb95f4c0)
0x79f93da8
0x79f93da8
0x79f93da8
0x79f93da8.**** (there's much more here but I'm on my iPad and it's taking forever to type, let me know if it's necessary info)
0x79f93da8
*
BDS process name corresponding to current thread: unknown
*
Mac OS versio:
Not yet set
*
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 10.3.0: Fri Feb 26 11:58:09 pet 2010; root : xnu-1504.3.12~1/RELEASE_1386
*
System uptime in nanoseconds: 181466366
*
*
--------------
*
Being a refurbished product obvisouly I'm weary something's wrong with it, is this something serious i should worry about or can someone help me get this up and running?* I'd really appreciate thanks. I'm using the snow leopard retail disk btw.

Also, if the disk isn't in the machine I get a blinking folder with a question mark upon start up, I've never started a bare boned Mac befor so I didn't think anything of it, figured it was because nothing is installed on it. Is that the case or is that not normal and possibly related?

Double-check About this Mac for the model of this Mac. The error you are getting is the error one gets when the Mac is newer than the Install DVD.

Update: so holding command/alt/shift/delete at start got me passed the kernel error and onto an OSx screen, looked promising, chose my language and hit install and got an "installation failure", "Installer could not copy necessary support files" error. I browsed the topic and found a fix, creating a dmg in disk utilities and installing from an external. When I try to create new image to my root, "could not allocate memory" error, when I try to create to any of my 2 drives or even my external as my final attempt, it spends about 15min creating half an image then it errors out saying something about failure on input/output...this is getting exhausting.

The "about this Mac" along with all the other menu options are greyed out so I can't select it