Can't factory reset 2008 Macbook

[anon4705295]

I just picked up the new Retina Macbook Pro (woop woop!) and so I'm selling my late 2008 Macbook (white) to a friend. It's running Lion, which I'd purchased, so I was trying to restore it to Snow Leopard, as I have the actual disks for those (well, I have the first disk, haha). This isn't the original hard drive that came with the laptop, though: that one'd had a S.M.A.R.T. failure or whatever a few years back and I'd replaced it with a 320 GB Western Digital hard drive.

I'm running into trouble, however, when I try to return it to factory settings. I did the Command+R bit and selected Disk Utility. I then selected the hard drive in the side menu and erased the disk, yadda yadda. I rebooted the computer and it popped up with the install Snow Leopard stuff, so I'm good so far, right? But when I try to select the hard drive to install SL on, it has that yellow exclamation point and says "Mac OS X cannot start up from this disk." What did I do? What do I do to fix this? Has anybody dealt with this before? I have no other options available short of the top menu. I also have only done this once in my life (said hard drive fail/replacement), so I'm not exactly knowledgable in what I'm doing, haha.

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

[anon(4698833)]

In Disk Utility, select your boot disk at the top level (not the lower, indented name but the higher drive identifier), then click on partition. In the lower right hand corner of the partition window, make the partition a little smaller. Some are saying just a1GB, some are saying just adjust it smaller, then adjust it back.

Hope it works...

 

[anon4705295]

I actually got it to work by erasing the smaller one and then the top-level :S I haven't ever heard of that working, but I tried it and it did the trick! Thanks for the suggestion, though ? If I ever have problems again I'll try that first