reinstall original stofware on Macbook Pro that has a bad disk drive?

[jayfusci]

Hi
I have an old macbook pro, running 10.4.11 and want to correct my errors on my disk report. It says " The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired". As well as " Error: The underlying task report failure on exit". Also a couple of others "incorrect number of thread records" and Volume Bit Map needs minor repair and "invalid volume free block count" Is there a way to download the start up disks? This mac has a supper drive that died a long time ago, I do have the start up disks. Can these be copied and placed on a thumb drive?

 

[DeltaMac]

You have several options:
1. Replace the internal superdrive
2, Use an external DVD drive. It could be most any USB external drive. Apple sells one, but you don't have to get that one.
3. Yes, you could use your Disk Utility to make a restore installer on a thumb drive. Use the Restore tab, select your restore DVD as the Source, and a thumb drive as the Destination. An 8 GB thumb drive should work fine.
You WILL need a working optical drive, of course. If you have another Mac, then you can do that from that other Mac.
That's the best bet for the Disk #1, which is the bootable installer. The second disk would be the optional installs, and your accessory software, such as iPhoto, etc. You can copy that disk with a simple finder copy to a second thumb drive, or to your backup hard drive.

Another point - the various errors may mean that the existing hard drive may be dying. An original hard drive in a laptop that's more than 5 years old - has likely served its useful life. You should consider replacing the hard drive, rather than wasting your time trying to resurrect one that might fail again very quickly

4. There are other possibilities, too - such as using a partition on another external hard drive.
Also, another option is to use another Mac to erase and reinstall OS X on your malfunctioning MBPro, using Firewire target disk mode. You would, of course, need an identical Mac that would also boot to the same 10.4 restore DVD.