Boot camp without a CD drive?

[redct]

Hi.

I have a Macbook Pro 17" (MacBookPro2,1 I believe) and it has a busted Superdrive that won't read or burn CDs and DVDs. However, I want to dual boot Windows 7—is this even possible?

I've already tried a bit of a long-winded solution. I used Parallels to install a virtual copy of Windows 7, then booted into that copy, used it and a Windows 7 ISO to make a bootable flash drive, installed rEFIt, and tried to boot from my flash drive. However, that doesn't seem to work as rEFIt just errors out and then prompts you to restart, saying that the firmware refuses to boot, and that support for booting legacy OSes from external drives is rather shaky.

Help!

 

[neilhart]

People with a MBA have the same problem, no internal DVD drive. I installed BootCamp WinXp on my MBA using a kludged USB interface to a loose internal DVD drive (from a PC using in external power supply to provide power to the DVD drive).

Some time ago I saw tips on generating an image of a VM and then installing the image to a BootCamp generated partition. However my solution worked so I did not follow up on this idea.

 

[redct]

That might work, although I'll have to see if I can scrounge up a CD drive from somebody.

Any other ideas?

People with a MBA have the same problem, no internal DVD drive. I installed BootCamp WinXp on my MBA using a kludged USB interface to a loose internal DVD drive (from a PC using in external power supply to provide power to the DVD drive).

Some time ago I saw tips on generating an image of a VM and then installing the image to a BootCamp generated partition. However my solution worked so I did not follow up on this idea.