Installer disc could not be found - Install Problem

I purchased a windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM to install on IMAC, 10.8.3 with lion. Tried with Parallels,VM, and boot camp. Disc could not be found for any. Suggestions?

Does your optical drive read any discs?

Make sure disc is clean and undamaged.

After you shut down, take a can of compressed air and shoot 3-4 quick blasts through the slot of the drive in diff directions to clean the lens.

Since you brought this up I'm trying other DVD's. Some work,some don't, but CD's are fine. Maybe DVD player is problem.

Dirty lens is more likely the problem.

Use the canned air fix. Have to do that to all my slot load drives at least once a year.
DVDs are affected before CDs.

DVD's playing fine now, but still cannot load windows through parallels, or boot camp?

Should my DVD default be idvd?

I experienced the same thing when installing the XP with Parallels 8 after keying in the XP serial number. The installation dialogue box indicated something like "... bootable installation disk not found." I am using a slipstreamed XP with SP3 disc.

I then switched the disc with the original XP disc which apparently is bootable and it works. So it looks like I have to make the slipstreamed disc a bootable one for it to work with Parallels.

I will share experiences on the Switcher's Guide thread.

What did you use to slipstream SP 3 to your XP disk? If the original XP disk was bootable and you slipstreamed using an app such as "autostreamer" the result will be a bootable XP SP3 disk.