Riddle me this! Dell sent me a windows 7 install usb . . .

[shipp]

So the tutorial for Virtual Box says: "Starting a new VM for the first time

When a VM gets started for the first time, another wizard -- the "First Start Wizard" -- will pop up to help you select an installation medium. Since the VM is created empty, it would otherwise behave just like a real computer with no operating system installed: it will do nothing and display an error message that no bootable operating system was found.

For this reason, the wizard helps you select a medium to install an operating system from.
If you have physical CD or DVD media from which you want to install your guest operating system (e.g. in the case of a Windows installation CD or DVD), put the media into your host's CD or DVD drive.
Then, in the wizard's drop-down list of installation media, select "Host drive" with the correct drive letter (or, in the case of a Linux host, device file). This will allow your VM to access the media in your host drive, and you can proceed to install from there.
If you have downloaded installation media from the Internet in the form of an ISO image file (most probably in the case of a Linux distribution), you would normally burn this file to an empty CD or DVD and proceed as just described. With VirtualBox however, you can skip this step and mount the ISO file directly. VirtualBox will then present this file as a CD or DVD-ROM drive to the virtual machine, much like it does with virtual hard disk images."

What if you have windows 7 install on a usb drive and its read-only i think (at least thats the only way I can mount it to my filesystem, using ntfs-3g and the -ro command. I already tried to make an .iso file out of the flash drive, which worked, but then VM says that the .iso is "inaccessible." So . . . Riddle me this, what do I do to install windows 7 in my vm?

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 and have virtual box 4.0

I thought about trying to mount the usb at the cd/dvd/mountpoint to trick the virtual machine into recognizing it as an .iso, but i can't even find out where to mount it to do that, and it seems doubtful it would work.

Some bright soul out there should be able to fill me in on this, i've struggled for days now and its becoming an obsession, plus i don't know a whole hell of a lot, its a miracle i was able to mount the ntfs filesystem in linux. Let me know.

[Sasquatch]

Simple, you got an OEM system and you have the restore media for it. That's it. You can't use an MS OEM OS in a VM, nor can you use the recovery media of your hardware inside the VM. It's in violation of the license agreement. The license is bound to the hardware, which means it may only be installed on the hardware directly. Want to run the OS in a VM? Too bad, you have to buy a license + media for it.

[fixedwheel]

What if you have windows 7 install on a usb drive ...

sorry the VBox virtual BIOS doesn't boot a virtual machine from USB
when converting into iso you should create a bootable iso (i never done this so i can't tell you more)
maybe you succeed with attaching the USB drive and booting from a Windows7 rescue CD (ask google, have seen this somewhere downloadable from MICROS~1), then calling the setup from USB. This still may fail for reasons explained by Sasquatch

[shipp]

Thanks yall. I spent the better part of a week trying to figure that out. Sucks I can't boot it, but hey, at least I know to give up. Appreciate the advice.