Repair disk without Tiger DVD?

I'm from Melbourne, Australia and am currently in Holland on a
research posting, I won't be home for another 2 months. I've noticed
my Macbook running a little slowly recently and decided to verify the
disk, it seems it needs some minor repair. The only problem is that I
didn't bring my Tiger DVD with me (yes I know, I'm stupid!).

Is there any way to repair the disk without having my disks couriered
all the way from Australia? I have a portable hard drive with me that
is several times larger than my current hard drive - i use it to
backup on a weekly basis - could that be used to clone and then boot
in target disk mode?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, I'd hate for my Macbook
to die on me with 2 months to go.

Suds

 

You need another Mac around, 1) connect your Macbook as external
Firewire disk to this other Mac, 2) boot your Macbook in Target mode
(press T when booting). You can then run Disk Utility on this other Mac
and fix your disk.

 

First of all, thanks for all your advice everyone, I really appreciate
it. One of the issues might be that my drive is not a firewire drive.
I have one of the newer 2.0Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbooks with Mac OSX
10.4.10 (latest update), can it boot from a USB 2.0 drive? And it
sounds like I will have to purchase Super Duper to make a fully
functional clone - is there a free way I can do it? Since a courier
from Australia with my disks would probably cost around the same...

Though at the moment it sounds like either finding another Mac or
borrowing some disks are my only real options...

 

[snip..]

Download & install AppleJack (http://applejack.sourceforge.net/)

It will provide you a safe method to do the fsck as well as other
maintanence & cleanup operations (such as cleaning finder caches
which is another possible cause of sluggish operation).