Install leopard without the disc

[Killphuqdie]

Hello,

My leopard disc has just arrived and now I have found that my CD drive on my mid 2007 black macbook is dead, the disc goes in no noise, no uptake and no life. I will have to take the mac in eventually but is there anyway of getting leopard on her without the disc or using a different drive and without having to get the train all the way to manchester.

Tools at my disposal: i have an old internal dvd drive for a dell pc and 2 vista laptops with built in dvd drives.

Thank you, first post here etc. please don't be mean >_<

 

[wrldwzrd89]

This IS doable - what you need to use is the Remote Install Mac OS X tool, available in Leopard for all Macs since 10.5.4. Unfortunately, you'll need a second Mac to perform the remote installation this way...

At this point your best bet is going to be an external optical drive. Since you have a MacBook it won't matter if it's USB or FireWire, unless of course you have the newest MacBook - the one that has no FireWire ports at all. This method will also work.

 

[Killphuqdie]

This IS doable - what you need to use is the Remote Install Mac OS X tool, available in Leopard for all Macs since 10.5.4. Unfortunately, you'll need a second Mac to perform the remote installation this way...

At this point your best bet is going to be an external optical drive. Since you have a MacBook it won't matter if it's USB or FireWire, unless of course you have the newest MacBook - the one that has no FireWire ports at all. This method will also work.

So any usb/firewire dvd player will work for the install?

 

[wrldwzrd89]

So any usb/firewire dvd player will work for the install?

Yes. As long as your Mac can boot from it, it'll work.

 

[Dimwhit]

If you can find someone with a Mac portable, you can also put the DVD in their computer, then boot their computer in firewire mode and mount it to your machine and install.

 

[BlueRevolution]

Unless I'm mistaken, Remote Install only works with MacBooks Air.

 

[Dimwhit]

Unless I'm mistaken, Remote Install only works with MacBooks Air.

I'm not 100% on it, but I thought I heard that Apple included that as a standard option in one of the Leopard updates.

 

[BlueRevolution]

All of the literature I've read indicates that it's still MBA-only, but I may be missing out on some third-party hack.

 

[cronnos]

I had the exact same problem and I was able to do this on my early 2008 MacBook. The drive stopped working and I needed to reinstall Leopard. The first thing you need is to get somebody to mount the Leopard DVD image into an external hard drive. Once you have found a Leopard image and it's installed onto the drive, you can boot from it. Here are the instructions from BlueRevolution:

"Okay, here's what you can do. Open Disk Utility on your old install, select the external hard drive, and go to the Partition tab. Click Options and select GUID Partition Table. Change the volume scheme to 1 partition, select the partition, and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format. Give it a pithy name, then click Partition. (This will delete all files on the external drive.)

Now use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the install disk to the external drive. Reboot, hold down the option key, and select to boot from the external drive. The installer should start. Before you install, I suggest using Disk Utility (available under the Utilities menu in the installer) to format the internal drive, again to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), with the security options set to zero out existing data.

After that, you should be set!"

You can read the whole tread here.

 

[finnschi]

Unless I'm mistaken, Remote Install only works with MacBooks Air.

Yes... No chance with a macbook, only works with OSX Server.

 

[BlueRevolution]

What does Mac OS X Server have to do with anything? I think you may be getting Remote Install confused with NetBoot. NetBoot is a feature built in to Mac OS X Server, but it can also be manually configured on any Mac. Yes, that's an option, but only if the OP has another Mac available.

 

[finnschi]

What does Mac OS X Server have to do with anything? I think you may be getting Remote Install confused with NetBoot. NetBoot is a feature built in to Mac OS X Server, but it can also be manually configured on any Mac. Yes, that's an option, but only if the OP has another Mac available.

Well, as far as I know that is The only way to Remote install OSX... I didn'T say anything about Remote Install, and yes i ment netBoot

 

[BlueRevolution]

Actually, there are a number of ways to install OS X without an optical drive, but unfortunately all of the ways that I know of require a second Mac.