What is the year/model of your iMac? Does it have a built-in Optical drive?

If you have a Windows ISO, you will need to burn it as a physical DVD. Please see Install Windows 7 and earlier on your Mac using Boot Camp - Apple Support and the Bootcamp 5.x help has more details. Click on Help in BC Assistant.

Let me know if you need to find the link.

PS: https://help.apple.com/bootcamp/mac/5.0/help/#/bcmp173b3bf2

Install Windows on your Mac

With Boot Camp, you can use Windows on your Mac.

What you need

• The keyboard and mouse or trackpad that came with your Mac. (If they aren’t available, use a USB keyboard and mouse.)
• An external USB drive (a hard drive or a flash drive) that is 8 GB or larger, formatted as MS-DOS (FAT).To format an external USB drive as MS-DOS (FAT), use Disk Utility, located in the Other folder in Launchpad.
• A Windows ISO image (a disk image that contains the entire contents of a DVD) downloaded from Microsoft, or both a Windows full-install installation disc (not the upgrade version of Windows) and a built-in disc drive or compatible external optical drive.To download Windows ISO images, see Microsoft Software Downloads.To find out which versions of Windows your Mac supports, see the Apple Support article System requirements to install Windows on your Mac using Boot Camp.
• At least 32 GB of free space on an internal hard drive.

Good morning David.. I am also getting the error when I try to create an .ISO from my windows 7 OEM install DVD. I have reviewed the links you provided and am getting different results. I have BC V.6.0.1 and it is not giving me the option to create the .ISO from the assistant. When I follow the steps to create it on a fat file format thumb drive I get the operation failed status 30. I have a early 2011 13" macbook pro.

BC Assistant does not have the capability to create an ISO from a DVD or vice-a-versa.

Please see Create an ISO image for Boot Camp from Windows installation media - Apple Support in order to create an ISO from a DVD. For a 2011 Mac, you need to use the physical DVD, not the ISO you create from it. An ISO is supported on Macs that support a USB Installer.

Thank you for your reply, however it brings up a second question. I initially did use just the BC assistant and the install DVD. It did load windows and it appeared to work on the surface, but it would not let me run windows update (it would just say searching for updates for HOURS). and when I tried to install MS SQL on it it also got to a certain point and hung. which is why I deleted the partition per instructions and started over going this route.

Any thoughts on the other issues?

Thanks again for your time.

On your Mac, you can download BC drivers to a USB, use the DVD to install, and then run setup.exe from the USB to get drivers in place. Were you able to check for any missing drivers in Device Manager when it hung on Windows Update?

Reinstalled windows with a licensed copy of 7 prof, appears to have all of the drivers that are on that thumb drive but win update still hangs. I do not see a specific driver for that but I assume it is part of one of the other packages. Not sure what else to do. I appreciate your help.

If you are using the UI to run Windows Update, try the command line method and check the logs. Here is an example.

Thanks again for your time, unfortunately that article is way above my head. I did find the latest update files via Microsoft support and downloaded them, however it still gets to a dialogue box that now says searching for updates on this machine. May just have to scrap it and stick with a separate windows machine..

thanks again for all your help.