Is it possible to copy a hard drive and use it to boot up 10.5?

Yep, that should work, using something like carbon copy cloner. I'm not sure you'd even need separate HD -- just use firewire target mode.

But why not just buy an external USB DVD-ROM drive? I think that would work too.

Or alternately just get a replacement internal superdrive.

If you have a legal copy of 10.5 (we won't discuss "other" means), place the Leopard DVD in your friend's machine, then boot it into Target Disk mode. You will see his machine and his DVD drive (with the mounted Leopard disk) as if they were part of your machine.

I've done it that way myself because of a lack of a DVD drive on a G4 & needed to install Tiger on it.

MLdrum41 said:

I own a older white MacBook and for some reason my Super Drive refuses to read any disk. I would really like to update to 10.5, but without a working disk drive I really don't know how to complete this without finding a torrent of 10.5 and putting onto an external drive and installing from the disk image, but I'm not too interested in doing that.

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Well actually, you can copy Leopard onto an external USB and run it from there...i almost positive i tried this before. An 8GB stick is like 40 bucks.

MLdrum41 said:

My question is, if I purchase an external hard drive, back up my friend's MacBook that does have 10.5 installed on it, swap it into my computer as an internal drive, would I be able to boot up using that? I guess in essence it would make my computer his computer, but I just want to make sure that this would in fact work.

Any help would be great!

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Sure. I would take an image of his entire hard drive, copy it onto an external drive, connect this drive to your computer, and restore it to the current hard drive in the macbook - which would erase all the file on there. If you want to backup your data, before you restore to the macbook, also make an image of your current drive and save it to the external hard disk. Then you can restore your friends image to your macbook and then mount your old computer to copy over any files and apps you need....

Of course I am not endorsing anything illegal as I assume you have paid licenses for all of the above...http://images.macrumors.com/vb/images/smilies/smile.gif

can't you put your MB with firewire to your friends mac. start yours in target disk mode. it should appear like an external drive on your friends mac. then just install leopard on your drive. should work.

MLdrum41 said:

Where can I get a replacement internal drive? I've looked around and haven't been able to find one.

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I've never ordered from them, but welovemacs.com has them.