Snow Leopard Clean Install
I have an iMac from 2010 and the Snow Leopard DVD and I am trying to do a clean install of Snow Leopard on it. Then, if I use the Install Snow Leopard option from the DVD, when it restarts it hangs on the apple icon, but if I restart the Mac nothing happened to my HDD.
I also tried using booting the DVD by holding 'Option' when I restart it, and after I choose to boot from the DVD, it hangs on the apple icon and I can hear that the DVD stop spinning.
I boot it on safe mode and use the Apple Hardware Diagnose Tool and no issues have been shown. I will appreciate if anyone have an idea of how I can perform this clean install. Thanks!
A Snow Leopard DVD may not work on a 2010 iMac. For example, according to everymac.com a iMac11,2 (21.5-inch, Mid-2010) came preinstalled with OS X 10.6.3. So, if your Snow Leopard DVD is OS X 10.6 then you should expect problems when booting.
Note: While one may think 10.6 should be 10.6.0, doing so would differ from Apple conventions. For example, see an image of the Snow Leopard 10.6 DVD or the system requirements for the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1.
According to @David Anderson (thanks!), the 2010 iMac came preinstalled with Snow Leopard 10.6.3. Therefore, there's a good chance that earlier versions of Snow Leopard (10.6.0–10.6.2) will not contain the necessary drivers for your machine, and will be impossible to install.
Apple released at least two retail Snow Leopard installation DVDs—I own one which comes with 10.6.0, and one which comes with 10.6.3. If you have an earlier DVD, that may explain why the OS is unable to boot.
So, one thing you could try is tracking down a 10.6.3 installation DVD, on eBay or similar. The disk you're looking for has part number MC573Z/A. There also appears to be an image of this DVD in the Internet Archive's Software Library, but I cannot personally vouch for its authenticity.
Another option is to install your DVD inside of a VM, upgrade to 10.6.8 within the VM, and then clone the VM to your hard disk. However, this route is made quite tricky by the fact that most VM software will refuse to install non-server editions of Snow Leopard, due to a licensing restriction that Apple lifted starting with Lion.