The "Bootable" legacy ISO you've used is in fact not bootable, it relies on CDROM emulation provided by BIOS. VMs don't usually do this sort of emulation. If you set the guest OS to something like ...

Normally, if you are unable to boot into Windows and cannot access your files, you can create a bootable drive and use the media to boot and repair your OS installation. Perhaps, not widely known by ...

Running Linux from a USB drive is possible. You can boot just about any distribution you want from USB. There are some things you should consider before going this route. I've used Linux in just about ...