Installing Lion onto a system running Lion (this is a fun one)

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So I have a unique situation. I have a 2011 Mac Mini that I bought from a third-party user. I got it for a good price however the catch is that it doesn't come with OS X installed. I've done OS X installs in my sleep so I figured it would be no problem. I get my mac in the mail and I plug in my Lion thumb drive that has worked great on three computers now... and I get nothing! All that shows up is a circle with a line through it.

I plug the thumb drive into two other computers and it works fine. I even partitioned an old HDD, installed OS X Lion, plugged it into the new mac and tried to boot from that and it still didn't work. I finally managed to get OS X Lion on my mac mini by restoring a Time Machine back-up from my last computer but for an i5 2.5 GHz, it seemed like it was running slower then I would like, and I had wanted to start on this mac with a "clean slate" to begin with.

So I plugged in my Lion OS X recovery drive into the computer and it tells me "This version of Mac OS X 10.7 cannot be installed on this computer." But it's already running Lion???? I tried booting from the disk using "Option" key on startup and I still get the circle with the line through it. I did some reading and I saw that Apple requires you to have SL installed on a system before you put Lion on it, so I though maybe that was my issue. So I partitioned a HDD I had and copied my SL disk onto there to use it as a boot disk. When SL appears on the computer when it's on and logged in, I get an error message saying something about install 23.1.1 first. When I press "Option" the boot disk is discovered, but when I click on it, the Apple logo appears and the HDD loses power then shuts off. The Apple logo just sits there and there are no loading indicators or anything. I've tried the same thing with a thumb drive and still nothing. Anytime I try to boot from any kind of external media, with the exception being the Time-Machine back up, all attempts have failed!

Any advice? The computer is working completely fine, I'm using it right now. But if I can't even run Utilities on my computer, I feel like something is horribly wrong.
 
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Do you have another fairly recent Mac that you can use to attempt to install Lion on your mini in target mode?
 
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Yes there is another one I could use. I thought about doing that but seeing as to how the mac seems to be rejecting all outside help, I didn't want to buy the cable unless there was a very good chance of success. I have no idea what is up with it. I'm probably going to go back to Time Machine and restore an earlier 10.6 update then hope the Lion disk works. Think that would work?
 

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