here is the problem.

want to tripple boot my system.

I have silent upgrade. got hold of leopard .dmg image. ecen though the dvd writer says it supports dl disks it wont write them get the cant calibrate laser error everyone seems to get. tried the international trick but no go. burned the disk on win 7 using transmac and the disk is fine. however mac wont read disk. going to try some compressed in slot.

the question is if i buy external dvd burner or use flash drive with .dmg file on it can i boot and install from that? everything points to intel mini only for this but thought i would check as mac so ailen to me.

If you have more OSX capable machines, you could start the other box as a firewire target and boot from that. Anyway, the drives in Minis tend to fail and/or are very picky about the medium. You should probably try a different dvd vendor (or dvd-rwdl instead of dvd+rwdl, etc). External dvd burner via usb should work OK afaik.

So your saying an external dvd usb drive will be bootable from ? I don't want to go and buy one lunch time and find it doesn't boot from it. i got so many different burners on so many differnet machines, dont need another one unless can boot from it.

I dont have any other macs( and never hope to own anymore :)) or I would use the cd/dvd sharing option.

@JJ
firewire external DVD are OK for bootstrap OSX (I don't know about bootstrap MorphOS).

If you have problems to bootstrap OSX or MorphOS from USB external DVD, you could try to bootstrap from it using YABOOT boot loader (you need to install before Linux)

jj
As jacek eluded to, it sounds like your problem is the dvd format. a -r would be the way to go to get that to work afaik..