Sacrilege: Windows on a Mac

I know, I know, but I had no choice. Some elements of my fancy new job absolutely require that I take my fancy new Macbook Pro and run some seriously unfancy Windows programs. So, fine. I continue my neediness and order even more new software, an install disk for Windows and a copy of Parallels for Mac (on the advice of brilliant daughter, who had already tried the Boot Camp path and found it to be silly). Software arrives, Parallels is downloaded, and suddenly I realize: the MacBook Pro has no DVD drive. I mean, I knew that, but I also knew that that really hardly matters, because I don’t think I used the DVD drive on my previous work Windows machine more than three times.

Check Parallels, and its website has a simple solution: I can use DVD sharing on one of my Macs that does have a drive, and just run the Windows disc over there. They even helpfully pointed me directly to the Apple knowledgebase article on the topic, which helpfully contradicted their contention by clearly stating that DVD sharing can’t be used for things like installing Windows. So I’ve used up Plans A and B, and am now scouring the internet for Plan C, and the advice is wildly awful. Nearly all of what I turned up was written by people who didn’t understand one system or the other; the good news was that their errors were almost always pointed out in just-south-of-trollish responses, but it was clear most of these approaches to the problem weren’t going to work. And all I really needed was a disk image of the Windows 7 install disk that Parallels could use to do the installation, on a USB drive. It seemed like it should be so simple.

Turns out: it was. I found one crucial piece of information in one of the threads regarding creating an .ISO file that the installer could read. All I had to do was insert the DVD in my Mac Pro, go to Disk Utility and choose to make a new image from the DVD. Instead of a Mac partition, I was to create the new image as DVD/CD Master. Putting that on a 4GB thumb drive, I would have a file with a  Windows gobbledygook name that ended in .CDR. So how to get that to change to an .ISO file? Ignore the people who posted Terminal scripts that would accomplish this. Just go to the file in a Finder window and change the name manually. Delete .CDR, make it .ISO. Quit Disk Utility, eject your thumb drive, put the thumb drive in the MacBook, and tell Parallels that’s where the Windows installation disk is. In the end, it almost couldn’t have been simpler.

Just a side note: I installed Windows. I installed nothing but Windows, and my entire machine is a week old. But as soon as I tried to run Internet Explorer in Windows, I found a nasty rogue that is called Antivirus Pro; it essentially hijacks your machine, redirects your URLs, and extorts you to pay for a key by putting up a list of alleged viruses your machine is infected with. The list is fake, but this thing is real. Now, where could it have come from other than the Windows install itself? Microsoft claims its antivirus tools are aware of it and will remove it, but I tried two of them without success. I found instructions for manually removing it, which took a little while and a few tries but did eventually work. So glad to be using Windows again! It couldn’t get to the FIRST task I asked of it without a massive problem.