Hard drive crash. Need help reinstalling OS x, some obstacles.

[Roark22]

Hey guys,

I have a macbook, an old one, late 2006, I believe. My hard drive crashed the other day, so I'm going to need to replace it. Once I pick up a new hard drive, to reinstall OS X i'm going to run into some problems though. I was running Leopard, as I upgraded from Tiger at some point in the past.

the CD drive is no longer working
I'm out of the country and it is a bit of a trek to the closest retailer

So what should I do. I have been looking into installing OSx from a usb. I have a second computer, but it's a pc. If I take the disk image I obviously can't write it in FAT22 because the size of the image is too big. Can I write it in NFTS and have the read only ability of the mac be enough?

I know they sell thumb drives for Lion, but I don't want to pay for it for one, and for two without a previous version it would not install.

So I'm looking for any sort of solution or assistance people can provide me with.

Thank you

 

[chibiterasu]

The lion usb stick would install without any os on your mac and it would probably be the easiest way (if your mac can meet its specs). I don't know where you live but you could ring apple and get them to arrange a repair of your disk drive by sending it to them. The only other thing is you could buy and external usb or firewire dvd drive and boot from that (firewire is better if your mac has a port for it). The long winded way is to create an iso from the dvd and then write this with a program like unetbootin to a usb stick (probably 8gb should do maybe more though). Hope this helps