Installing Windows 7 Upgrade on a MacBook Air using Parallels
After reading the rumors of a new MacBook Air being released together with Lion OSX, I patiently waited to get a much needed laptop upgrade. Now that it’s here, I find myself ignoring my Mac Pro! Everything I need from Dreamweaver to Photoshop runs pretty smoothly on the MBA. I even tried Adobe Premiere for a bit and didn’t have any problems. Although, I wouldn’t recommend buying MBA for video editing purposes.
The only roadblock I hit was when I tried installing Windows 7 Upgrade under Parallels. I use Parallels to run few Windows apps and do browser testing. Part of the roadblock was the lack of DVD drive on MBA and part of it was Microsofts pain in the behind upgrade rules.
According to Parallels help forum “Macbook Air CD/DVD “borrowing” feature doesn’t support media streaming”, so I had to create an .iso image of my Windows 7 Upgrade, copy it over to the MacBook Air and mount it using Parallels to install it. It was kind of tricky, at least for me, so I decided to write up this short guide for anyone else in a similar situation.
Create an image from the CD
- With Windows CD inside the DVD drive, launch the Disk Utility
- Select File->New->Disk Image From Folder
- Make sure ‘uncompressed’ is selected and save the file on your Desktop
- This will create a .cdr image which is unusable on Windows, so you need to convert it to the .iso image
Convert .cdr to .iso
- Launch the Terminal
- Type in following (assuming you saved the .cdr file on your Desktop and you named it Windows.cdr)
cd ~/Desktop hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o Windows.iso Windows.cdr
Copy the .iso image to your MacBook Air
If you have a full version of Windows, Parallels is pretty good at guiding you through the installation process, but if it is an upgrade, like it was in my case, you’ll need to install older version first and then perform the upgrade
Note: I tried a clean install of Windows 7 Upgrade, but it failed. It kept telling me that the CD key was wrong. Windows will not continue with an upgrade if it can’t find a previous version of it’s OS on the computer.
Mount the upgrade .iso image to the virtual machine
- Start your Windows XP Virtual Machine
- From the Device menu select CD/DVD->Connect Image
- Navigate to the .iso file of Windows 7 and upgrade dialog will popup guiding you through the rest of the process.
Note: Once you’re done, Windows 7 may not be able to connect to the internet until you install the Parallels tools into the Virtual Machine.
