If you have a MacBook Air with a missing disk drive or a MacBook Pro like mine with an optical drive inactivated by a dent in the corner of the case, you are in luck here.

Odds are you have an older operating system and need to upgrade to OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The unfortunate ones buy an upgrade disk before realising they can’t use it, while the others just wish there was a way to circumvent their conundrum.

That said, you will still need a dvd drive on a mac somewhere. Borrow a sibling’s or a friend’s or secretly use one at the local mac store when none of the Geniuses are looking (i didn’t just say that).

By the way, the method described below works for ALL iterations of OS X. Have disk, will install.

Recap of items needed:

1. Valid copy of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (or whichever version you have) on DVD
2. A Mac with a DVD drive
3. a blank or erasable thumb drive/hard disk (at least 8GB of free space). Would like to try this using an SD card as well (if anyone does, let me know)

This is what i use - spare 2.5" HDDs on eSata.

Steps:

First, insert the installation disk into the mac’s optical drive. The disc icon will show up on the desktop.

Second, connect the thumb drive or external hard disk to the same Mac (can’t be too careful here).

Third, launch the Disk Utility application (Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility)

Generic Disk Utility Window (Click to Enlarge)

Next, select the thumb drive or the hard disk on the list on the left within Disk Utility.

Then, just below the top tool bar, click on the ‘Restore’ button (nestled within a row with First Aid, Erase, RAID and Restore). This brings up two fields for you to complete: Source and Destination.

For Source, drag the DVD from the list on the left into the blank field.

For Destination, drag the destination thumb drive or disk into the blank field.

Then click the Restore button at the bottom right of the frame.

You will be prompted to erase the drive if it isn’t already empty. Click ok. (don’t complain – i’ve already reminded you beforehand to use a blank or erasable drive…)

The restoring will take place.

Once completed you’re done!

You will now have a drive with an installable copy of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (or whichever version you restored from). Either way, just plug it in to your laptop (or any other mac in need of upgrading for the matter) and install as per normal! Don’t worry, you won’t see the error message stating that you will have to burn the image to a DVD. The method i described takes care of that.

Note:

If you’ve a large hard drive, you might opt to partition the drive.

As with restoring, partitioning will require you to erase the entire disk.

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