Boot from USB drive in VMWare Player?

[GordonKeehn]

I'm running VMware Player V5.0 on a 64 bit Windows 7 platform.  Is it possible to boot from a USB drive for OS install?  When I power up the virtual machine it tries to boot from the network before I can set the keyboard focus to the virtual machine.

[WoodyZ]

Booting from USB is not directly supported although you can try using Plop Boot Manager to acomplish it.

[johnhc]

GordonKeehn, I have used Plop for testing a bootable USB stick on a W7 x64 VM.  I created an ISO with the Plop boot manager and mounted it to the VM as an optical disk.  The optical disk is then booted and Plop offers a list of devices to boot from.  Selecting the USB stick (mounted before booting optical disk) allows the USB to be booted.  Enjoy, John.

[GordonKeehn]

Thanks for your answers.  PLOP worked a champ.

[johnhc]

GordonKeehn, great, you are welcome.  Enjoy, John.

[swinster]

This is a gem of info. I would, however, like to see a native direct USB boot within a VM.

[WoodyZ]

swinster wrote: This is a gem of info. I would, however, like to see a native direct USB boot within a VM.

The problem is the standard virtual BIOS used by VMware Fusion/Player/Workstation does not support booting directly from USB, the technology in that BIOS is just to old.   Also since the standard BIOS is becoming a thing of the past I just do not see VMware updating the virtual BIOS and instead at some point officially supporting in VMware Player/Workstation the UEFI/GUID Firmware now officially supported in VMware Fusion which is able to boot UEFI/GUID USB Drives.

In VMware Player one can add the following option to the .vmx configuration file.  Note that while officially supported in VMware Fusion it's not yet officially supported in VMware Player/Workstation however it does work.

firmware = "efi"

They may also, while still keeping the existing one to maintain backwards compatibility, incorporate another newer standard BIOS with USB being bootable.  However again since the future really is going to be more UEFI/GUID based I suspect they'll focus more on improving that technology in their products over a standard BIOS being able to boot USB.  It's hard to say where their heads at and of course it against company policy for the employees to discuss unannounced features, timelines, etc.  Until then Plop Boot Manager is a handy utility to boot non UEFI/GUID based USB Drives!