How can I Download a MSDNAA Windows ISO without using a Windows machine?

Question

From my university, I can obtain Windows licenses. The only chicken-egg problem is that the official downloader only runs on Windows. Is there any way to get the Windows 7 ISOs via a regular download on Ubuntu, without using their official tool?

Answer 1

See the following Super User questions:

• [How can I reinstall Windows 7 if I lost my installation DVD?][1]

• [Windows 7 Activation FAQ][2]

The first has links to where you can download ISOs of Windows 7 directly from Microsoft's online disk image distributor. The second has information about how activation works - to summarize the relevant part, for MSDNAA licenses (I'm a student and my school has MSDNAA, so I've verified this is true) you can use the license key you get from the MSDNAA website with any installation DVD, although in some cases you may be required to call Microsoft's activation hotline to complete the activation.

Answer 2

Wine would be a good choice in this case, however I find that it can clog up your system sometimes (and it isn't stable at all in my eyes).
As such, can't you just use the good old way of asking a classmate to FTP it over to you? (an alternative is Crossover, which is basically an improved version of Wine, and in my eyes really stable)

Answer 3

If the MSDNAA Software Center doesn't offer you "custom delivery method" as an alternative to the standard download, then it is likely that your institution doesn't provide any alternative to the Windows-only download tool. You should contact your usual IT support folk (probably the departmental IT group if there is one) if you want to confirm this.

Presumably, you have access to Windows computing facilities of some sort. This is probably your best bet. Once you've downloaded the ISO you can burn it to a DVD for installation.

Wine might work, as already suggested, or you could do the download from a friend's PC.

For the benefit of other readers who may be puzzled, the standard method for downloads from the MSDNAA Software Center involves a special tool that downloads an encrypted file (either direct from the software center or from a local campus web server) and decrypts it. Institutions can provide students with other means of obtaining media, but then access needs to be authenticated and recorded, so I suspect most places just depend on the standard process, ugly as it is.