I plan on buying a Mac mini of the new generation without an external DVD drive if possible. I do have a few PCs running Windows Vista or different Linux distributions but no Mac.
I know that it is possible to mount a DVD from a Windows PC. Is this sufficient to install a virtualized environment using Parallels Desktop 7 (which is out in a few days)?
Even better: Is it possible to install it using Boot Camp (supposingly not). Or do I need to buy an external DVD drive?
Honestly I would use the Windows PC to create an ISO DVD Image of the Windows 7 Disc. From there you can mount the ISO within OSX to use for a virtual installation.
For the Boot Camp part of your question, you can use the Windows 7 DVD and create a USB Thumb Drive installer, You should be able to select the USB drive when booting the Mac Mini to boot from and then install Windows 7 on the Boot Camp partition.
A well, you can't install Windows from an iso alone on the computer, as it needs to reboot which would unmount it. The files on the disk need to be readily available during the setup process, so burning to a disk or copying thr setup program to the hard drive then running it would work
Edit: this is for the boot amp part of the question
