Here's what I did...
You would think an external hard drive would work but I don't think the Max, i.e. OS X, shares anything but the primary HD and printers.
What I wound up doing was copying the contents of the DVD to the Mac's HD and then I was able to see it and assign a drive letter to it.
If your external HD has more on it than the free space on the Mac HD, then I'm at a loss as to what you could do.