Hi first post here..I was wondering if anyone could help me with this problem I'm having with my old macbook. Every time I boot it up it shows a folder with a question mark, and I searched google and read somewhere that it means that it cant find the os on the hard drive. The superdrive is broken so there is no use in looking for the restore disks....BUT! I have an external hard drive and was wondering if there was anyway of putting the os on that and just booting it from the external, I'm not sure if this is possible or not. Or if there is something I can do to get it to work. It would help out soooo much!

There's not really a way without getting the restore disks or a fresh install on another computer.

Since you can't boot from cds on that machine, you'd have to use another mac and either install from restore disks to an external attached to that machine or backup the restore disk to a large USB thumbdrive.

Ok so I can get the os on the hard drive? because I just need it to work haha.
How would I go bout doing that? Or is there something I can look up to help me. Because I have never installed an os on an external before.

you install it just like an internal hard drive, but you still need access to the restore disks and a computer that can run them.