Tried to migrate a site and it wasn't working so I decided to rebuild from scratch

The new server is php 5.3 and when I try to do a new clean install of 2.4.6 it gets to Building database schema... and stops, error logs read the following

[Tue Jan 17 00:07:59 2012] [error] [client X] PHP Warning: $project isn't set in /var/www/vhosts/X/httpdocs/sapphire/core/ManifestBuilder.php on line 268, referer: http://X.com/install.php
[Tue Jan 17 00:07:59 2012] [error] [client X] PHP Fatal error: Class 'Page' not found in /var/www/vhosts/X/httpdocs/sapphire/core/model/SiteTree.php on line 1291, referer: http://X.com/install.php

Any help would be appreciated I've been in migration hell for 4 days now :)

Your mysite/_config.php file should contain a couple lines like

global $project;
$project = "mysite";

In 3.0 this will be not required.

Those variables are in the config. Like I said I was trying to do a clean install extracting the SS tar right on the server to make sure no files got missed.

I did manage to migrate a another site to the same server with only minor problems. (I used the <? shortcut in one of my classes so 5.3 didn't recognize it)

FYI I just ended up finding an copy of 2.3 on my system, installing that, then upgrading to 2.4