Create and mount virtual USB flash drive

[pcgeek101]

Hello,

I use VMware Workstation 9 for a lab environment on my laptop. As an IT engineer who builds and manages operating system deployment (OSD) processes, I need the ability to test out certain processes using USB flash drives. Unfortunately, I do not always have a USB flash drive available to test with. It would be very convenient if I had the ability to use VMware Workstation to create a virtual USB flash drive, rather than requiring me to have a physical USB flash drive to use.

Is this a possibility?

Cheers,

Trevor Sullivan

http://trevorsullivan.net

http://twitter.com/pcgeek86

[WoodyZ]

pcgeek101 wrote: Unfortunately, I do not always have a USB flash drive available to test with.

As prevalent as flash drives are today and as inexpensive as they are I find it hard to believe, especially for someone that works in the industry, not to have several flash drives laying around and handy at all times.

It would be very convenient if I had the ability to use VMware Workstation to create a virtual USB flash drive, rather than requiring me to have a physical USB flash drive to use.

Is this a possibility?

Not at the present time.

[danielocdh]

I'm guessing this won't be an easy one, still after all this time I can't find a solution for this.

Everywhere people is saying just use a pendrive, which I really don't get, my fastest pendrive has a sequential writing of around 30mb/s, my ssds can sequential write at around 528mb/s and my nvme can sequential write at around 1837mb/s. If you want to test something a bit big on a VM real pendrives are so painfull.

[alexanderv]

As with VMware Workstation 14 it does not seem to be possible.

This bugs me for some years now.

And given all the money I sent over to VMware it's incredible that they did not mange to provide a way to boot from a virtual USB stick image. So we have to continue to waste our time to prepare physical USB sticks from USB images we already have downloaded to the hosts file system.

[continuum]

If you have images created with tools like dd you can treat them as a vmdk of type monolithicFlat or VMFS if you are using ESXi.
Just create the descriptorfile like this:

# Disk DescriptorFile

version=1

encoding="windows-1252"

CID=fffffffe

parentCID=ffffffff

isNativeSnapshot="no"

createType="monolithicFlat"

# Extent description

RW 837632 FLAT "usb-image.dd" 0

# The Disk Data Base

#DDB

ddb.adapterType = "lsilogic"

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "12"

Adjust this line:
RW <size of image in sectors> FLAT "usb-image.dd" 0
to match your dd-image.

[DinamikLer]

VMware doesn't like us. Do not do.

[a_p_]

DinamikLer​

Does Re: Idea / Feature Suggestion: Useful to have vmdk disks, usually SCSI / SATA / IDE, make possible f...​ help?

André