Windows – Creating boot disk for Windows 7 on MacBook Pro

bootcampdisk-utilitywindows

EDIT: I gave in and burned the DVD from a windows PC and I was able to install Windows on my MacBook Pro with Bootcamp. Sorry, that I don't have a satisfying solution.

My goal is to install Windows 7 (32-bit) on my MacBook Pro (late 2007) with Boot Camp. (I'm trying to do all this on Mountain Lion.) I am running into multiple problems creating the disk image for Windows 7. I have an ISO file of the Windows 7 DVD. I am fairly certain, that the ISO image is not corrupted. I downloaded it twice, with the DreamSpark download manager, with the same results.

Initially I tried to create a bootable USB key. The USB key is formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS+). I opened Disk Utility, went to the restore tab, chose the ISO as source and the USB key as destination. The following errors occurred:

  • When the ISO-image is unmounted: "RESTORE FAILURE Could not validate source – Invalid argument"
  • When the ISO-image is mounted: "RESTORE FAILURE Could not validate source – error 254"

After repeating this a dozen times, I tried solve the problem from the Terminal as suggested in many forums:

$ sudo asr restore -noverify -source /path/to/windows/windows_7.iso -target /Volumes/Untitled/ -erase
    Validating target...done
    Validating source...
Could not validate source - Invalid argument

Since this also didn't work, I then tried to burn the image on a DVD. So I went into disk utility, chose the Windows 7 ISO, and chose burn.

I get prompted

Waiting for a disc to be inserted…

I insert a brand new DVD-R.The drive starts to do something and notifies me

Waiting for the drive.

And then immediately ejects the disk again and prompts me for the a disc.

Best Answer

Try using dd instead of asr.

  1. Use mount to determine the device path of your attached USB disk. Find the disk itself and ignore the individual partition numbers. EG: if you get /dev/sda1 just use /dev/sda for the next steps.
  2. Unmount the disk in the Finder.
  3. Construct and run your dd command as such: dd if=/path/to/windows7.iso of=/path/to/usb/device
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