Burning Snow Leopard to a safe file format?

[SD-B]

My MBP is 3 years old and I have one of the full Snow Leopard OS discs, 3 in fact as it came with Works and Life and is good for 5 computers although i only have one.

I have just downloaded the latest OS But I want to make a copy of my Snow Leopard disc in case the CD gets too old and no longer works properly as what happened to an earlier disc of mine once. The problem is that my DVD internal drive is not working so I need to rip it to .dmg I suppose it is and then save it should I ever need it as I ican no longer use it in the dvd drive on this mac---and no i dont want to buy a new one for it as I am likely just going to buy a new mac this year, but until then i want to make sure i can access it if i need to wipe clean my hard drive at all.

But what I need to know is if I do save it and I do format my drive, or wipe it clean to start over, would I be able to use it and if so, how?

IF not, could I take that ripped file and put it on a disc and burn it to CD on someone else's computer using their burner?
Obviously I could do that but would it work??

Thank you for any/all help

 

[SD-B]

is this really that difficult to answer???

i thought it was a fairly straight forward question?
No?

 

[benwiggy]

You can use DiskUtility to create a disk image of the DVD. But you will need to burn it to a DVD to boot from it. (You may want to check the size of the disk required, as IIRC, Apple may use a particular size that might be larger than some blank disks.)

Your best option is to install a clean version of Snow Leopard onto an External drive, and then clone that over to your internal hard drive if you need to.

However, you should very rarely need to reinstall the OS -- much less do a clean install. Nearly every problem that you might experience can be resolved by other methods (unless you start deleting core sections of the OS).
A Time Machine backup of your entire disk will also be more useful should anything go wrong.

Also, if you're going to buy a new Mac this year, then you may want to get an external SuperDrive for it anyway. They are cheap, and that would fix your current problem with your DVD drive.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

How To Make Copies of DVDs

 

[vistadude]

Dittos making a copy of the dvd in another computer.

You could also make a usb flash installer of snow leopard using this http://www.maciverse.com/install-os-x-snow-leopard-from-usb-flash-drive.html


Actually I installed mountain lion from an external hard drive, which is much faster. You can leave most of the hard drive space for saving data too. There's probably a similar way to do it from a snow leopard disk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCnkAJUL8eA

 

[simsaladimbamba]

There's probably a similar way to do it from a snow leopard disk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCnkAJUL8eA

Yep, there is. I have a 500 GB HDD with all Retail Installers of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard through OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which I got from DMGs I made from the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVDs and the DMGs one could get from the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installers.
I simply partitioned that HDD with ten partitions, one for each installer, one for each installation and one for application installers and one for temporary backups.

I then used CarbonCopyCloner (version 3.4.7 is still free) to clone those DMGs onto the installer partitions and it was done quite fast.