Use a Hard Drive as a ISO?

Hello everyone,

I have a rather weird situation.

As you guys know I was helping a friend yesterday, well when I get home I get the news that on my son's computer his Windows crashed and is completely unrecoverable. He thought he would be a smart kid, and try to recover and somehow wiped the drive several times trying to recover an old image. I've tried to recover data, and tried to use Windows CD I had to do a backup. Somehow he screwed the backup too. Not mad, cause at least he tried. No harm, no foul really.

But now I'm stuck at an impass. We live kinda outside of town, and at the moment have no recovery media. I stepped on the damned CD this morning trying to get kids up for school. It's a wash. I have no USB sticks.

But I DO have several old hardly used HDDs.

Can I somehow turn them into ISO images that I can boot up from?

I have the ISO images, just nothing to put them onto. I am at a loss for what to do. And thought maybe this might be a fix? They're just standard 2.5'' mechanical hard drives that have been wiped clean.

Any help?

Should be able to use the HDD to make a bootable USB like for linux, but no idea of how to do that with Windows ISOs.

On the other hand there is an android app (needs root) that makes the phone appear as a CD drive on the PC and you can dump all the ISOs on you SD card and choose which gets booted. I also forget the name of this.

Shouldn't it be possible to temporarily connect the drive to a second PC, mount the ISO, copy the files to the HDD, then put that drive into your son's PC to reinstall Windows?

IDK. Just guessing. But it's easy to try... right?

Hi, I have use previous model but maybe something like this should solve the issue
http://www.zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=12

grub2 should be able to boot from iso (loopback).