An exciting excerpt from my day. Maybe someone has a suggestion?

It’s a day of weird problems for me. A client brought me their laptop after they were unable to install 10.6 on it. They’d bought the OS X Box Set, so it was a full install CD. When they tried to install, it failed partway through the process. They told me they couldn’t get the optical drive out. “No Problem,” I’d told them. I imagined I’d either just hold down the trackpad button on startup to eject the CD and/or hold down the “T” key, put the machine into Target Mode and install using the disk on my own computer. Well – holding down the “T” key did nothing – not after the usual 10 seconds or so and not after 90 seconds either. Moving on to the next option on my list, I removed the drive, put it in an enclosure and ran the installer from my computer using their CD. The install failed 3/4 of the way through. “Perhaps it’s their CD” I thought. I tried my CD. Same result. I ran Disk Utility on the disk and it reported no errors. Maybe the CD or optical drive were at fault? I opened up Disk Utility again and made a disk image of the install CD. Once that was done, with some minor steps in Terminal, ran the install from the Disk Image. This got about 80 percent of the way along and failed, telling me it couldn’t write some files to disk. Since I didn’t have another idea, I thought I’d backup their User folder, format the drive and try again. I started copying their user folder over to an external hard drive. The process proceeded well enough until it got to their Music Folder. The copy started failing on every 100th file or so – with a finder error telling me the file couldn’t be copied due to, well, I should have noted it, but pretty much due to a disk error.  I called my client and suggested they buy a new drive from Amazon. They did this, shipped it to me and I assumed we were on our way to being done. Since I still had the enclosure out that I’d been using before I thought I’d just slip the drive in there, install from the disk image I’d made earler and then put it back in their laptop. It failed. I tried again using the CD and it finally worked. Whew! I put the disk back in its holder, inserted it into their laptop and… failure. No disk found icon flashing on the screen. Cool, no? Could I have done something weird, like formatted it wrong? Luckily I had my brother’s laptop still here (I need to get that back together!) so I took his hard drive and put that in their machine – same result. And the darn thing still won’t boot into Target Mode. Never seen anything like this. Still thinking about what to do next… oh, didn’t expect it to, but resetting PRAM didn’t even make the chimes that it usually does. Wacky.