Macbook Pro - OS X install from external DVD

[shriphani]

Hello everyone,

I am in the worst possible situation here. My early 2008 MBP's superdrive decided to not read DVDs and I hence cannot boot from the Snow Leopard DVD. In addition to that, Onyx and Disk Utility say that I need to format my HD (I mucked around with partitions while kicking a Linux distro out of my computer). So, can the MBP boot from an external USB DVD drive? Can anyone recommend a cheap drive for me?

I can't believe this machine's DVD drive died in 2 years. That is just unacceptable. I watched only 2 movies using the DVD player in the entire time I owned this laptop.

 

[Kenndac]

I can't recommend any in particular, but Macs can boot off pretty much any USB device that uses "standard" storage techniques — hard drives, flash drives, optical drives, etc. Any USB optical drive should be fine.