RE-Install Tiger with no disc drive.

Question

Here's my problem:
Old MacBook 1.83 GHz with a disc drive that seems dysfunctional. It actually did not read any CDs or DVDs, and was recently replaced by a third party warranty company. When I received the computer after the warranty work, it read CDs again and allowed me to boot from the MacBook restore disc. I erased my hard drive in anticipation of reinstalling Tiger. During the verification of the install disc, it spit an error message at me saying the disc was dirty or smudged, suggested that I remove it and clean it, and then try again. I did this, and received the same message. The disc looks sparkly clean with no scratches or fingerprints. I then chose to ignore the warning and install anyway. Install eventually failed and asked that I restart the process.
The warranty repair noted that there was a mounting bracket that was broken and it was not covered. THe note explained that the tech was going to try and complete a makeshift repair that allowed the drive to work. I suspect that there is something wrong SOMEWHERE (who knows where) related to the optical drive that is preventing me from successfully reading the disc and installing the software. On another note, the drive will NOT start up from a retail Tiger DVD either. (For reference, I was initially using the 2 discs that shipped with the MacBook for the reinstall.) I called a friend, who is quite knowledgeable on this and recommended I turn the Macbook into a firewire drive (T key at startup) and use a different Mac to read the disc and install the software directly to the now empty MacBook. That did not work either. Once I got to the install screen and allowed to select a volume to install Tiger to, it would not allow me to use the MacBook saying it could not install because it was unable to startup using Mac OS X.
So I'm stuck with a white MacBook brick, unless I can find a way to read the disc properly, or install from some external source. Are there any ways anyone knows I could get OS X onto the MacBook?? Thanks.
I'm usually really good with this kind of stuff, but I'm stumped and excruciatingly frustrated.

Answer 1

I have a very similar problem: white 2006 MacBook with a bad optical drive, had to replace internal hard drive, cannot figure out how to use machine-specific system restore discs to install the OS on the internal. I've been puzzling over this, and here's what I think I've discovered:
Problems being:
* Can't use retail Tiger disc, because it will not install on an Intel MacBook. (From what I've read, there are no standalone retail Tiger discs for Intel machines.)
* Installing via FireWire target mode from on other machines wouldn't work, because other models won't boot from these machine-specific Software Restore discs.
* Can't put disk images of the install discs on an external drive and install from there (at least I don't think that will work).
Potential solutions left, as far as I can tell:
* Create bootable partition on external hard drive. Using Disk Utility on another machine, "Restore" the installation disks to this external HD partition. Boot MacBook from this ext. HD partition, and then install from those images onto internal HD.
* Buy Leopard retail disc, boot other machine with it, and using FW target mode, install on the MacBook internal HD.
* Get an external optical drive or replacement internal drive.
In my situation, all three remaining solutions involve a purchase, which I'd like to avoid (good money after bad). But if any of them work for you, good luck!