HOWTO boot a virtual machine from USB

[pmorch]

Challenge: I want to boot a virtual machine from my physical USB stick. (E.g. because I'm developing a bootable USB stick - which was what I needed to do)

Solution: Basically, you'll notice that the virtual machine's BIOS doesn't let you boot from a USB stick. Some suggest to mount the USB block device as a hard drive but I never got that to work. No, instead, boot to a CDROM image, that basically is just a boot loader, that knows how to boot from a USB stick.

Got this from Great tip how-to boot from USB stick inside of VMware Workstation , but I just wanted to post it here, because it took me bloody ages to stumble across this elegant and simple solution.

[PaulSvirin]

Thanks for your great instructions.

I've seen a method of emulating USB stick as raw SCSI device, have a look at this one: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/177112 - did those instructions fail for you?

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Paul Svirin

StarWind Software developer ( http://www.starwindsoftware.com )

[continuum]

its a pity that the search function here is working so bad - I posted the same several times here recently - it really works like a charm

I use it for PE-sticks, Linux-sticks and even ESXi-sticks




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