Repair boot volume without dvd

Hi,

My MBP has a broken superdrive that I'm not very keen on fixing since I never use it anyway. I'm trying to repartition my harddrive, but it won't work because the volume needs repair (some minor errors, it seems). How do I repair the volume without booting into a boot DVD like I normally would? Is there a way to boot from a usb drive and do it? Any other way?

Since you don't give any detail as the what the "minor errors are."
If you have enough room on your HD, which if not, could be your partitioning problem, other than the fact that you are trying to partition a drive that you are booted from
You can download Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and clone your HD onto an external drive. This will give you a bootable clone of your system that you can boot from holding option while you boot, and then selecting the drive when it shows up.
You can then go to disk utility once booted, select your internal HD and do what you want from there.

Ge64 said:

How do I repair the volume without booting into a boot DVD like I normally would? Is there a way to boot from a usb drive and do it? Any other way?

Click to expand...

Answer to your first question is 'yes'. An Intel mac will boot from a USB external drive.

Second question - 'yes', providing you have access to another Intel Mac. Boot one or other Mac in Target mode How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode.

Repair can be carried out either way. I'd use option 1.