After my laptop got hosed with Win10 I revived with a new HD and finally got Win7 installed and am starting from scratch. I then got the computer configured as a dual-boot machine with Linux Mint 17.3 as the default OS. I'm using Linux as much as possible but of course find a few pieces of software that I would like to use in Linux that only seem to run in Windoze. Rebooting and going back an forth is getting old.
I ran WINE to run a simple Windows program and that was better, but I also have a couple of programs that will not run 100% in WINE so hope that VMware Workstation Player will be a good solution. I've installed VMware Workstation 12 Player (Non-commercial), ver 12.1.1, last night and this evening (or at least this week) want to install Win7 Home Premium which I have a license key (the same one that i installed on my revived computer) as the guest OS on my Linux Mint 17.3 host OS. In my dual-boot configuration I first installed the Win7 O/S from a Windows 7 AIO disk that I bought through eBay and it installed fine using the original license key that came with my laptop several years ago. I would like to use that disk (if possible) to install the same OS in VMware in Linux. I'm presented with three choices: Use physical drive, Use ISO image and I will install the O/S later. Okay, so the Win7AIO disk is not an ISO, and I was able to browse the DVD as a physical disk but clicking on setup.exe (which I think came up with a menu of different versions of Win7 to chose from) did not work. I browsed the DVD for other options but didn't find something that looked suitable.
1) Can I install Win7 Home Premium from this Win7AIO disk, the same one that I revived my laptop a few months ago? If so, how?
2) If I can't do #1 above, where do I find the Win7 Home Premium SP1 .ISO image to download (it seems to be removed from the Microsoft website)?
3) Can I create an installation ISO that I burn to a DVD from within the Win7 program itself, preferably with the drivers for my specific laptop already present (such as a recovery disk?)?