MacBook Pro 8,1 beeps 3 times on boot from FireWire drive: why?

In fact, it is a late 2011, not an early 2011 "New Old Stock", so you're correct it shipped with Lion. But, aside from its weird ergonomics (Dynamically-attributed spaces and different gestures from the previous OS X versions), what turned me off was the official complete impossibility to get a physical copy of Lion at a reasonable price, when it is installed. I also wanted the mounted drives to appear at the top left corner in Finder windows, as they did in pre-Lion OS X, instead of the bottom left. I wanted to put back the Firefox profiles in their place... Turns out the Library folder isn't visible in Lion.

Simply put, anything I wanted to do to start on the good foot wasn't possible on Lion.

I went to the Genius Bar, and indeed their own external rescue drive also made the Mac beep. I told them about the Snow Leopard tethered downgrade. They were aware of the method, but there was no Snow Leopard Mac remaining in-store. And with the install DVD causing kernel panics, there was no way to at least try a dual-boot installation (Snow Leopard for mission-critical apps, Lion for playing around with).

To another Apple-approved place I went. The young tech here was willing to perform the downgrade (since it would have cost me $75/hr), and had both Snow Leopard and Lion machines. But I argued that I wouldn't be willing to pay twice since I intend to switch to SSD in a short while. He then tested when booted from a clone, and Snow Leo half-installed on the internal drive (needs one reboot during installation), but it ended up in kernel panic. Same went when he tried the physical Snow Leopard disk after formatting the internal drive, hypothesizing something detected on it may prevent Snow Leopard installer to boot. It immediately went into a kernel panic.

Both techs were actually surprised that this signal came out, instead of a message stating (official) incompatibility, as well as kernel panics.

My hypothesis is there's something in the Snow Leopard installer that accesses the hardware at a lower level during installation, but not during normal execution or Target Mode, hence causing kernel panics in the former.

What else can be tried, or what else didn't go through my mind?

Actually, since I don't know how you put that Mac symbol, I find it easier to call the key the same as it's labelled regardless of keyboard used. Just out of convenience when typing pure text, where this symbol may not be available.

I have this one. "option" key doesn't ring any bell for me, so I call it what I can read. I didn't knew it was for Windows applications, since this "alt" existed even when G3 and Mac OS 9 ruled.

"Enter" nor "return" exist on my keyboard, they are symbols-labelled keys.

I still call the "cmd" key "Apple" key from time to time.

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Back to the topic please!

What exact version of Snow Leopard shipped on this MacBook Pro (8,1) at the beginning of 2011? What was the last version of Snow Leopard released on retail DVD?

My hypothesis here is that the Snow Leopard DVD I bought was 10.6.3, and that this version doesn't support i7 CPUs as they were not available yet in Macs. I know 10.6.7 and 10.6.8 appeared in the first half of 2011, but I don't know when i7 first appeared.

If no 10.6.7+ retail version existed, that would explain why the tethered downgrade method must be used in order for the downgrade to be successful.

Seems like the well-known "tethered install" method worked. Who knew an old BlackBook could still be useful?

Universal DVD images of 10.6.7+ must be available, at least to techs. How would they reinstall any 2011 Mac otherwise? It's not practical to keep as many install DVDs as there are computers. Or it is?

This is still not good news as, if I go on and decide that speed is more important than capacity, I'll buy a 120GB SSD 'cause superior capacities are still way too expensive. I have yet to find a fast and reliable 240GB SSD for less than $300. Plus, for some unknown reason, the BlackBook had a very sluggish restart. It seems it is trying to reindex everything.