Boot Camp Assistant "Windows 7 Installer disc could not be found"

Question

I'm attempting to Boot Camp a partition on my MacBook Pro Retina (13", early 2013) and it's not working. I purchased a Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit DVD and i'm accessing it through the optical drive on my desktop iMac. So far so good; MBP shows the disc on its desktop through remote disc sharing. The USB drive with downloaded Windows drivers is in place.
However, Boot Camp Assistant won't recognize the Windows 7 DVD, even though it's right on the desktop (remotely). There is a dialog box and it says "Installer disc could not be found .. wait a few seconds"
And that's it. Nothing further happens.
Help! I hate Windows! Why am I doing this??

Answer 1

Lightwave wrote:
Thank you! I bought Windows 7 on a physical DVD (it's the Home Premium 64bit disc). Hope that was the right thing to do?
Yes.
So let me get this straight. I can either use this DVD directly on a superdrive plugged in to MBP, or else burn a copy to the USB stick.
MBP will not install from an external SuperDrive due to Windows installer limitations, because it has no driver for the SuperDrive.
How exactly do I do the latter since my own DVD reader right now is by remote disc on my iMac?
Create an ISO using the following procedure on the iMac and then copy it over the network to the MBP or create an ISO by attaching the SuperDrive to the MBP. Use Bootcamp Assistant to point to this ISO when creating the USB for installation.
From Disk Utility 12.x: Duplicate a disk, CD, or DVD
Step 7 will give you an ISO, that you can then copy to the MBP.
Duplicate a CD-RW or DVD-RW
Disk Utility can’t create usable copies of discs with an incompatible format or discs that are copy-protected. (These include most commercial movie DVDs and audio CDs and some software and data discs.) To copy music from an audio CD to another CD, use iTunes, not Disk Utility.
To burn a disc, you need an optical drive in your computer or connected directly to your computer. You can’t burn a disc using a remote optical drive.
Open Disk Utility, in the Utilities folder in Launchpad.
Insert the CD or DVD disc in the optical drive, and select it in the list at the left.
Choose File > New > “Disk Image from [disc name].”
Type a name for the disk image.
Choose an option from the Image Format pop-up menu.
Choose “compressed” to create a smaller disk image.
Choose “read-only” to create a disk image that’s quicker to create and open.
Click Save.
After Disk Utility creates the disk image, eject the original CD or DVD.
Select the disk image in the list at the left, and choose Images > Burn.
When the Burn Disc dialog appears, insert a blank CD or DVD, and then click Burn.
You can continue using the disk image to create as many duplicate discs as you need.