I have a Macbook Pro which is a couple of years old and signs of age are starting to show. I wanted to upgrade to Snow Leopard recently, but the SuperDrive just isn’t working very well anymore. Whenever I tried to boot from the installation DVD, it just made a couple of disgruntled noises and then spat out the disc.
I’ve had this issue before with some mediums it couldn’t read. Sometimes it helps just reinserting it a couple of times and eventually it will start reading the disc. Not this time around though. After trying about 6-7 times, my patience had the better of me.
Luckily I’ve found a workaround and it is dead simple.
- Grab one of those spare USB drives you have lying about anyway.
- Create a new partition of say 8GB with Disk Utility.
- Clone the Mac OS X install DVD onto that partition.
- Reboot with the drive attached to your Mac.
- Install Mac OS X.
The details of how to do it can be found in this blogpost.