Solid state hard drive—Haven't been able to do a clean Reinstall of Operating System.

Any suggestions?

Going to try to be linear in explaining what I did:

-Have a 2010 Macbook Pro 7,1 / I swapped out to a solid state drive.

-I have to try to get to at least Lion: It had it, but then crashed, and it would only reset to the original operating system, Snow Leopard. But I need at least Lion for security issues, etc. I'm trying to get Yosemite on it, but all is failing.

-error with trying to boot from the original OX 10.6.3 disk. Won't do it.

-won't do a recovery install from command-R / ****I can't find out whether I can even do that on a newly formatted SSD on this older Mb Pro model. I'm not sure if it's just not going to happen and I need to try to do an install of the original operating system somehow.

-Made a bootable USB thumb drive with Yosemite, but just crashed it to the 0 with slash sign through it.

If anyone has any suggestions, much appreciated. I would try to clone the old hard drive, but the reason why I can't is that I couldn't verify permissions, etc. the hard drive seemed to have issues, and/or the software OS seemed to be an issue to, therefore the clean install.