Restoring time machine backup to new hardrive

hello,

I am attempting to restore my mothers old computer which has been continually backed up using a time machine (more accurately Time capsule).

have suceesfully installed the new hardrive in the macbook 5,1 late 2008,

The old hardrive was not damaged and the computer was running fine. the reason for hardrive replacement is for more storage.

i was able to boot new hardrive using the supplied recovery disk, 10.5.6

my mothers latest backup is a snow leapoard 10.6.8, i believe this may be causing the issue. i have a snow leapoard install disk

after booting, using the disk i formated the hardrive with erase function in disk utility.

then attempted to restore old hardrive on to the new hardrive using restore entire system.

the restore completes sucessfully and commnicates the user to restart the computer by holding dowm the power button for three seconds.

when the computer restarts it fails to boot and spits out a number of errors.

I believe that the problem has to do with the backup (timemachine) running a more recent version of OSX then the supplied software recovery disk. but i am not sure

i would really like to know what else i should try or what i should be doing differently.

thank you

Kevin