Using Gentoo to Save My MacBook Pro

[tenspd137]

Hi everyone -

I screwed something up on my MacBook Pro. It just keeps giving me the gray screen with the apple and little wheel below. Then it restarts and just gives the same screen. I had rEFIt on it and I was trying to fix the DVD reader, which I think is fried. I tried cleaning it with a cleaning CD (the guys at the local MacLife store told me to try that). Then I tried resetting PRAM and then the PMU (when you remove the battery, hold power for 5 seconds, and then powe it back up). Anyway, nothing worked so the DVD is fried, and the last step seems to have screwed up rEFIt as well. I do have a legit copy of OSX, and I like to play around on it occasionally. Anyway, I used parted to make a bootable hfs+ partition on a USB stick. I then formatted it using mkfs.hfsplus from diskdev_cmds and my Gentoo system recognized it as such. Then I dumped rEFIt onto it and tried to get the MBP to recognize it by holding down option after hitting the power on button. the MacHD comes up, but nothing else.

Does anyone know how I can put the install DVD on a USB stick so I can reinstall everything? I inherited the Mac Book (it is older, but I didn't have to buy it) but I have better things to spend money on than paying Apple to fix the DVD player. I don't have many files (like I said, I just play with it) so reinstalling isn't a problem, and it seems like a waste since I transfer most my files over the network. It seems like a waste to have it fixed but also a waste not to try to get something to boot with a USB stick.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated at this point.

Thanks!

[cach0rr0]

Have you stumbled on this per chance?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/liveusb.xml

Works brilliantly for me - i usually go the manual route rather than the unetbootin route, but either should work.
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[tenspd137]

No - I haven't seen thtat. After looking at it - I think it is close, but not quite it. What I wanted to do was use Gentoo to basically put my OSX install DVD on a usb stick so I could reinstall OSX on the Mac. I was using it to learn iPhone programming. I tried just doing dd if=/dev/dvd1 of=/dev/sdc with dvd1 having the DVD install media and sdc being the usb stick, but it didn't really work. But it is close. Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

[tenspd137]

Actually, I just amnaged to dump a rEFIt bootable cd to my USB stick using the method I just described and it worked - guess I just need a bigger USB stick. But the HD is still hosed. *Sigh*

Thanks for the suggestion though!