Installing Snow Leopard with an external DVD drive - which drive?

[Glar]

Howdy everyone,

Here's my dilemma:

I was very disappointed today when I plugged in my new iphone 4 for the very first time and found out that it requires 10.5.8 to sync.

You see, my Macbook pro had an unfortunate liquid accident a while back that killed its disc drive. As a poor student unable to pay for the repair, I have lived with my tiger OS, and without the ability to burn discs for a while now, and as annoying as it was, I managed. However, a non-syncing iPhone is the last straw.

I really don't want to return the phone and go back to my 3g. After a lengthy call with Apple I was told my cheapest option would be buying an external dvd drive with which I can install Snow Leopard.

The technician was not able to recommend to me a drive.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions!

My MBP is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 17" running 10.4.11

Thanks,
Glar

 

[Mal]

I like the Lacie external drives, but just about any drive that is Mac compatible would be fine. One note, FireWire drives have tended to work better than USB, but of course are also somewhat less common.

JR.com has the Lacie d2 DVD drive for $63. They're a reputable site. Buy.com has it for the same price too.

jW

 

[FourCandles]

External optical drives go for next to nothing on eBay, at least they do over here. I recently picked up an old LaCie Firewire drive for less than a tenner (OK, $15) including postage.

 

[Glar]

Thanks guys!

 

[Flow16z]

If you're looking for an Apple hard drive you may want to look into a Macbook Air external Superdrive; however, I'm not sure on wether it will work on other computers of the Macbook line.

 

[Flow16z]

If you're looking for an Apple hard drive you may want to look into a Macbook Air external Superdrive; however, I'm not sure on wether it will work on other computers of the Macbook line.

Sorry I take that back after digging through the Apple site I found the requirements for said Superdrive:


System Requirements

MacBook Air computer
Mac Mini Server

 

[ctyhntr]

Do you have a friend who has a mac with a working drive?

1. have your friend mount snow leopard and share it out.

2. You'll need an 8 gig USB, and use disk utility's restore feature to transfer the files over to the USB. key. You can mount that USB drive to continue the install of Snow Leopard.

 

[FourCandles]

Do you have a friend who has a mac with a working drive?

1. have your friend mount snow leopard and share it out.

2. You'll need an 8 gig USB, and use disk utility's restore feature to transfer the files over to the USB. key. You can mount that USB drive to continue the install of Snow Leopard.

Or Remote Install OS X?

 

[Glar]

Alright so I received my LaCie drive today.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be recognized by my computer. It comes with almost no instruction and says that the drive should appear in system profiler. The only place I can find any mention of it is under one of the usb drives, and there are no options when you select it.

I meet all the system requirements. What do I need to do to get this thing to work? I filled out a support form at LaCie and am waiting to hear back from them.

Thanks again.

 

[FourCandles]

Can you launch Disk Utility, select the LaCie drive and post a screenshot please?

EDIT: also of the volume(s) that appear underneath it

 

[Glar]

As far as I tell there is no mention of LaCie within my disk utility. Just the (broken) internal drive and my hard drive. I took a screen anyways.

 

[FourCandles]

Oops, sorry, i'd forgotten the rest of this thread and was thinking this was a hard drive.

This is a CD/DVD drive, yes?

However, my LaCie external DVD write still shows up in Disk Utility as an "Empty external optical device:" even with no disk in.

Do you have access to another machine to see if that recognises it?