Mid 2007 Mac Mini Booting Problems

Hello Everyone,

My friend recently got a used Mid 2007 Mac Mini 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo 80GB HD and 4GB of RAM. It did not come with an operating system so I installed the highest it could take which is 10.7.5. This ran just fine after setting the start up disk to 10.7.5 (as I guess windows used to be on it). The Mac Mini ran great until my friend decided to move the computer to another room, when he started it up it got stuck at the apple and loading wheel screen and never got to the deck top. I tried to load the recovery partition and that would not load either. Since neither of these partitions were booting I decided to try and boot from the USB 10.7 install drive I made and that would not load either. The next thing I tried was putting the Mac Mini in target disk mode and nothing would show up on my iMac Late 2006 so I hooked it up to my MacBook Early 2009 and the HD and CD drive would not show up there either. Next I took the HD out of the Mac Mini and put it in my Macbook early 2009 and it booted just fine. Using this Macbook I erased the HD and reinstalled 10.7 and put it back in the Mac Mini but again it got stuck at the same apple and loading wheel screen. Next I decided to put my 10.6.3 DVD in the mac mini and it boots that just fine. I erased the HD and installed 10.6.3 but when it restarts and gets to the welcome video the audio plays but there is no video or language select screen, just a gray screen. Next I put in my 10.5 DVD and that booted just fine too. I erased the HD again and installed 10.5 just fine. I can boot 10.5 normally without any problems and everything works so I installed the 10.5.8 update and the Mac Mini continued to work great. Unfortunately though my friend wants it to run 10.7 or 10.6 at least, so thinking the HD is the problem he got an SSD for the Mac Mini. I first tried to install 10.6.3 but I got the same loading problem as the old HD, although now I can boot into safe mode in 10.6.3 just fine which I could not do before with 10.7 or 10.6 on the old HD. Using verbose mode I could see that 10.6.3 on the Mac Mini was getting hung up on "DSMOS has arrived" after a couple minutes it would then change to "resetting IOCatalogue" where it would sit for a while and then change to some Firewire error and something about 3 minutes. This firewire error thing would then repeat every couple minutes. Through all of this I have checked and repaired disk permissions and verified the disk after each installation that was not successful. I have also reset the PMU, SCM, NVRAM and PRAM a couple times but that does not make a difference. I guess the only thing the Mac Mini can run is 10.5 but, I can't help but think, if it can run 10.5 why can't it run 10.6.3 or 10.7? Please help with any suggestions or ways to fix this problem. Thanks!