OSX Leopard installation issues

[RJW3]

Hey all,

Let me explain the situation. I have a friend who owns a MacBook Pro that he purchased just under two years ago. A couple of months ago he dropped the laptop and the disc drive failed. This past weekend, the hard drive crashed also. He called me after discovering at the Apple store how much they were going to charge him to replace the hard drive.

I pulled out the old (failed) hard drive, which no longer works at all, and replaced with with a new one. However, the issue that I am now having is that I can't find a way to load the OS from his existing installation discs back onto the MB Pro. I have attempted to load from a USB external hard drive, a iMac via ethernet cable, the same iMac via firewire and a MacBook Air SuperDrive. None of these options has worked thus far.

Anyone have any ideas? Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

 

[karazelle]

You have two options here:
1) Boot the MacBookPro (MBP) into Firewire target mode by connecting two Macs with a firewire cable (800 or 400 doesn't matter) and holding down T on the keyboard as the MBP boots. On the other Mac, you should be able to both use Disk Utility and install OS X from the install disks to the MBP presented as a firewire disk on its desktop, or...
2) Use Disk utility, the install disk and a USB memory stick of 6Gb+, and using Disk Utility, "Restore" the MacOS X Install DVD volume to the USB stick.

 

[RJW3]

You have two options here:
1) Boot the MacBookPro (MBP) into Firewire target mode by connecting two Macs with a firewire cable (800 or 400 doesn't matter) and holding down T on the keyboard as the MBP boots. On the other Mac, you should be able to both use Disk Utility and install OS X from the install disks to the MBP presented as a firewire disk on its desktop, or...
2) Use Disk utility, the install disk and a USB memory stick of 6Gb+, and using Disk Utility, "Restore" the MacOS X Install DVD volume to the USB stick.

When I boot the MBP with the Firewire connected will the disc automatically appear as an external drive on the desktop of the iMac or do I need to turn on/turn off security measures, disc utility programs or something similar to get the iMac to recognize it?

Thanks for your help

 

[karazelle]

It will appear automatically as an external drive, (should be) unmounted as usual, can be reconnected as usual and in all ways should behave like the whole computer is a disk drive.

You do not need to turn on or off anything to make it work. A firewire logo should be bouncing around the MBPs screen.

 

[Kaveman]

"holding down T on the keyboard" while the MacBook Pro is booting.

The MacBook Pro's internal drive will then appear on the iMac desktop as another standard HDrive.
You can then just treat it like you would any Drive, Disk Utility, Installers, Drag and Drop.