It appears that either I got a bad ISO for Windows 7 or Microsoft generally provides unbootable ISO’s. In either case, I was faced with the problem of getting a 2,5GB Windows 7 ISO which would not boot from a virtual machine. Instead of re=downloading the image, there is an easier way to fix it.
As long as you are able to mount the ISO or extract it, you can just follow these simple instructions (you need to have twice the amount of the actual ISO you want to reimage available as disk-space):
- Download the following zip-file and extract to C:-drive
- Extract the Vista or Windows 7 iso using 7Zip or WinRAR (Or copy the contents of the DVD) into C:\BOOTISO\DVDIMAGE
- Open up a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd)
- type: cd C:\BOOTISO
- type: oscdimg.exe -n -m -bc:\BOOTISO\DVDIMAGE\boot\etfsboot.com c:\BOOTISO\DVDIMAGE c:\BOOTISO\ISO\Bootable.iso
With the above process you will copy the content of your ISO/DVD to the .\DVDIMAGE-folder and the oscdimage program will re-create the boot-instructions in the newly created ISO. Once the Bootable.iso has been created, you can delete the .\DVDIMAGE-folder.
The above will work for any Windows operating system which boots in this fashion (i.e. Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows 2003 etc).
