I have a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro (MacBookPro6,1) and my optical drive has died. I need to install Windows on it, and was hoping to do so via Boot Camp.
I have a Windows 7x32 .iso and have also created a (nominally, untested) bootable USB stick via the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. Using the tip on this page I can mount the disk image locally and get Boot Camp to create the Boot Camp partition, but when I reboot I see "No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key"
. Presumably this is because I cannot boot from USB on this older model MacBook Pro.
I've purchased Paragon NTFS in the naïve hope that creating a NTFS partition and copying the ISO or bootable USB to that would work, and tried using rEFIt to boot from such devices. In both cases the end result is a black screen with flashing underline, but no further message.
I also have an external drive (USB and FW800) that I can format and partition in any way that might be helpful.
Is there any way I can get Boot Camp/Windows 7 working on this machine…other than replacing my optical drive with one that works?