VMWare, Windows, Apple...

April 7, 2011 8:15 AM

Installed VMWare Fusion 3.0 on a Mac. Now want to install Windows 7 on the Mac as a virtual machine. Here comes the confusing part.

So, I've downloaded and installed VMWare Fusion 3.0 on a Mac.

I subsequently went to microsoft.com and bought a downloadable copy of Windows 7. I downloaded the files on to my Mac.

What do I do now? Do I have to burn the Windows 7 installation files onto a DVD/CD? How do I do that on a Mac?

This is probably an easy question to answer but I'm a relative newbie with Macs.

Thanks....

posted by dfriedman to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: Under the virtual host you can mount an .ISO file as a cd/dvd image.
posted by devbrain at 8:16 AM on April 7, 2011

Best answer: is it an ISO file? if so you can burn it with disk utility.
posted by denaps at 8:17 AM on April 7, 2011

Response by poster: No, it's not an .ISO file. The file name is Win7-U-Retail-en-x64.exe.
posted by dfriedman at 8:21 AM on April 7, 2011

Response by poster: I think I may have answered my own question here. I now see that Microsoft gives me the option of downloading it as a .ISO file, which I am now doing.

Thanks for that reminder.
posted by dfriedman at 8:24 AM on April 7, 2011

You should probably read this as well.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:50 AM on April 7, 2011

For future reference, the .exe file is a setup file you run on an existing windows machine (usually along with a couple of .box files), mainly used to run an upgrade on that machine to bring it up to windows 7, rather than a clean install. It is possible to extract and convert the files to an ISO, but it's a lot simpler on a mac to just grab the ISO directly as you're doing :)
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:26 AM on April 8, 2011