I have had an iMac for about two years now, and a month ago it broke – out of the warrantee period. I had burnt a DVD and then, just as the process finished and the disk tried to eject, it failed. The disk was unable to eject and would just go back in and remount. This was mildly annoying, but as I generally never use the drive, I wasn’t too bothered. In fact, the most annoying thing was the icon hanging around on the desktop all the time.

However, I decided it was time to rethink my home media setup and wanted to move all my music and videos onto a remote disk. While doing this, I thought I may as well reinstall the whole computer, which hasn’t been rebuilt despite being upgraded to Snow Leopard and me installing and uninstalling lots of applications. I couldn’t see any performance effects from all this, I’m just a tidy person.

But how do you reinstall a computer when your DVD drive is having a love affair with another disk?

My first plan of action was to fix the DVD drive. So, I watched some videos, read some blogs and then, eventually, decided to give it a go. First, you have to pull at the magnetic glass screen with an official screen remover (or TomTom mounting sucker, in my case). Then, you have to unscrew the aluminium casing and pull it off, not snapping the cable to the webcam/light sensor. The most fun part comes next; you unscrew and remove the actual display. I would be less scared performing surgery on myself, but as it turns out I managed to do it without destroying it or the many short cables that connect to its underside.

After all this you can unscrew the DVD drive, disconnect it (having removed the tiniest screws in the world) and then wonder how this tightly integrated, flimsy drive can be accessed without breaking it. I almost gave up, then noticed that just four small screws needed to be undone and the whole top just hinged away. Lovely. I could get right at the disk then, and was able to just take it out.

I carefully ensured that everything was in its place and working, and then slowly reassembed the mac. I booted it up, it made a noise that it hadn’t made for ages: silence. It felt great. I popped in a trial disk to see what would happen and it grabbed it, mounted it and everything seemed fine. I pressed eject, and it has been mounting and ejecting every three seconds during its powered life since.

Luckily, I have a nice new drive on order, costing €50 including postage from the States.

But I still wanted to reinstall my software and get going, and as I’d recently seen Remote Disk in action, I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to do. And, using it, I have successfully installed Snow Leopard from scratch using Remote Disk on an iMac.

Despite enabling the remote disk options in Terminal and following the usual tips, I still couldn’t see the Remote Disk option when I started with the option key held down.

So, I had another idea, and decided to look at installing from a USB key. It is possible, apparently, according to Maciverse. But I still had relatively little luck as I was using Windows to create the disk images. So, I ended up with a bit of a hybrid solution. I was using a Windows laptop as the DVD host, and managed to get sharing working (unusually for Apple, you have to go into the Windows Control Panel and enable the sharing, after installing the one-step sharing software). I then used the Mac to read the remote disk and directly  restore the USB key from the Remote Disk, following maciverse’s instructions otherwise.

And hey presto, I had a duplicate of the DVD installer in the form of a small and mighty USB key. I option-restarted and the disk was selectable, from where the installation proceeded as normal.

I hope this helps some other impatient mac user, who can’t wait to repair their DVD drive!