Mistakenly installed Lion on a disk that only accepts Snow Leopard. I get a circle with a slash. What can I do?

Kappy, I hope the wedding went well and I'm still fussing because I need this Mac mini to teach. Why this is so difficult is that I'm currently doing volunteer teaching in a Maya Indigenous pueblo at the edge of the jungle in the Yucatan but near gorgeous Maya pyramids. And I don't have and can't find my Snow Leopard Disks as I wrote. I thought I brought with but can't find so assume that I left them in at home. I am so remote and so poor is the pueblo that I can't go out and buy a Thunderbolt cable and I can't go out and buy a blank DVD disk large enough to burn a copy from the Snow Leopard image that I DO have ... not to mention NO ONE here has a Mac only PCs. The closest Apple store is 100 miles away in the state's capital. So I am trying to figure this out with a USB and not succeeding either. I made the mistake of installing Lion because the Mac mini A1176 is a 2ghz and it SHOULD accept Lion but does not. I continually get the circle with the slash. The Recovery Disk you recommended I use I've tried. It loops me back to Lion where next I'm faced with the circle with the slash again and round and round. Can you provide any more solutions because at this point, I am at the end of my rope. My MacBook Pro which I also brought with me is not compatible with the A1176. Thank you for your time.

I DID IT !! And I did it as I thought logical and within the narrow perameters of a very limited situation. From reading and watching youtube videos using disk utility created an install dmg image on my Kingston 16G flash drive. After using disk utility to wipe the malfeasant Mountain Lion, reinstalled Snow Leopard 10.6 from the flash drive. No problem although for a novice it was a very sharp learning curve. Because I DO keep all of my apps on a portable external hard drive, it is now easy to install all of those as well. Thanks for your attention especially Kappy who seems to be helping lots of people from the sites I've visited..

Would this Lion recovery partition be the reason I'm having trouble installing updates after successfully installing 10.6? The updates from apple.support are causing 10.6 to crash.

I installed 10.6 from the flash drive onto my A1176 macmini and then tried to update 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 from apple support but failed on 10.6.2 and the system looped me back to the Lion recovery image and I was forced to erase Snow Leopard and start all over again with the Snow Leopard install. Fortunately, I think I left my original Snow Leopard install discs inside of a second macmini that I left with Apple techs in the city last month and will be traveling back in two weeks to pick it up. Then this hassle trying to improvise because I am still trying to tutor English will be over AND I promised myself NEVER to do anything rash with a fully functioning mac mini again 🙂 !!!.

Not being able to find my Snow Leopard install disks has been maddening because I am generally a well organized person.

Kappy .. .I DID leave my Snow Leopard install discs with my other broken Mac mini at Apple Store. I now have them. So I will now start over and carefully follow instructions.

You are beautiful!! This step was critical(without you are right/ I could not install) and I'm now installing from my original disc fortunately left at Apple Repair. Thanks everyone!!!