How can I USB boot a VM in VMWare Workstation 9?

Question

How can I boot a VM off USB in VMWare Workstation 9? I don't see the USB I have attached in the bios boot order.

It's clearly attaching before boot, as this shows up before the VM even starts running:

Solution 1

There is a workaround, in your virtual machine settings, add a new "harddisk", and when prompted to select the type, choose "physical disk" , and then point it to the usb stick.

This way, the usb will appear as a real drive to the virtual machine.

Solution 2

You can use "Plop Boot Manager". See its features here.

• USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
• CD/DVD boot without BIOS support (IDE)

Comments

[user79032]

Is USB icon in status bar active? And, you are talking about virtual BIOS of VM. Right?

[rtf]

@SachinShekhar Yup, it's connected. And yes, virtual BIOS. No, I'm not restarting my computer and entering the BIOS to configure my virtual machine.

[rtf]

Had to remove the USB controller to get this to work. I'm guessing it's because it didn't like attaching the same disk twice. I probably should have just removed the device itself from the VM but lazy. Thanks for the fix!

[rtf]

While I did greatly appreciate your solution, I just wanted to note for future users that this is a really, really messy way to do this. MBR ended up my flash drive somehow, and half the time it won't recognize the drive anyway.

[sharp12345]

@Tanner It work fine with me, however one thing you need to take care of, when you set it up, it is assigned to a specific physical device by number, like: Device: \\.\PhysicalDrive2, and when you remove it and/or restart the host computer, it might get assigned a different number and will require to re-create a new harddisk, and the old reference could be pointing to a totally different drive.

[Anthony]

Would this solution work if the USB stick had a filesystem unrecognized by Windows?