Help! Dead hard drive, next steps

[sheetzam]

My wife's 2007 Macbook hard drive has died. Her optical drive is unusable, making installing the OS on a new hard drive a challenge. We think she has a good backup on our Timecapsule. I'm planning to buy a new hard drive to replace her failed one, but I need to know the procedure to re-install the OS without an optical drive. We have another mac in the house, and I'm considering upgrading both it and her laptop to 10.6.
Any hints on the best way to re-install everything from the TimeCapsule?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

If both Macs have Firewire*, you could use Target Disk Mode and start the Mac with the working optical disk drive (ODD) in TDM (hold down "T" after turning it on) and use its ODD to install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard onto the other Mac.

*

 

[harddrivefailur]

I would say that because you are considering already buying a new hard drive, you should just get a new optical drive as well. That way, you don't have to deal with these somewhat "outside-of-the-box" solutions.

Not saying that they are wrong, but just that there is an easier way and you should take it.