clean installation of windows 7 on macbook air

I finally just realized that getting a cheap external USB DVD is the best solution.

If you know of a way to do it reliably, comment with a link below. The problem is that for some reasons burning the Windows 7 ISO to a USB drive under Mac OS X just doesn’t seem to work. After some investigation many others are having the same problem. I read some guides that explain how to create a USB install disc that you can then boot with using some third-party software ( like one from CNet) but could not get this solution to work. Microsoft has a tool for creating a USB boot install disk from a downloaded Windows DVD ISO file, but it won’t work on OS X. It doesn’t have an optical drive so you can’t just install from a Windows 7 DVD. I have access to a Windows machine but I wanted to go through the process to see what it would be like if a person bought a MacBook Air and that was their only computer. It’s doable but not easy, especially if you don’t have a Windows computer available to create the USB install drive.

I began to search for a way to boot Windows 7’s installation using a USB flash drive instead of an optical disk.

When I first started trying to get my MacBook Air going with Windows 7 I did not have an external DVD drive. It will be faster than using Windows in a virtual environment, especially if you have less than 4GB of RAM. Although virtual environments are pretty good now, so don’t count them out too quickly. If you are like me and actually want to run Windows 7 almost exclusively, then Boot Camp is the best option. Just be ready to be annoyed constantly with spam from either of the companies after you sign up for the free trial. If it is too limited, give one of the other commercial packages a trial before buying since they can cost $50 or more. I recommend starting with VirtualBox since it is free. The above links will show you how to get Parallels or VMWare Fusion going. To learn how to use Virtual Box, check out their documentation.

Clean installation of windows 7 on macbook air