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

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