USB Thumb Drive not recognized in Hyper-V Manager
Solution 1
There isn't native USB device support for Hyper-V VMs for a plethora of reasons. The main one is that it would break in live migration and failover scenarios. This is pretty typical of type 1 hypervisors. ESXi doesn't support generic USB devices connected to the host either.
You can work around this by presenting the USB disk as a passthrough device as outlined in this TechNet blog post. The linked example uses the GUI, but you can do it all using diskpart.exe
and the remote Hyper-V Management console on your Hyper-V 2012 server.
Solution 2
Finally I found a solution.
- Connect to your Hyper-V VM using RDP (not Hyper-V console)
- Before logging in, enable the USB thumb drive on the RDP client's Local Resources tab.
- Voila, your USB thumb drive shows on the VM's Windows Explorer
More here.
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Vazgen
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Vazgen almost 2 years
I have the free, standalone core Hyper-V Server 2012 running on my physical machine. I set up remote management from my Windows 8 client.
When I proceed to create a virtual machine I would like to install the OS from a usb thumb drive but it is not recognized in Hyper-V Manager on my client (when the USB is plugged into the physical server) nor is it recognized in Server Manager under File and Storage Services > Volumes
Is there a role needed to recognize external usb flash drives? Because I think this standalone version is just core Hyper-V role and that's it... but this is such a basic functionality.
Can anybody comment.
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Vazgen over 11 yearsI think this cannot be done in core, diskpart gives me an error when I try to set the disk to offline: "The operation is not supported on removable media" Same as here: social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-IE/winserverhyperv/…
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Vazgen over 11 yearscan I open disk manager in core or is this this tool added with a role?
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MDMarra over 11 yearsI'm not sure, to be honest. If diskpart doesn't work, then disk manager won't either. You may not be able to mark a usb thumb drive as offline, it might only work for actual usb external hard disks. The command to launch disk manager is
diskmgmt.msc
. If you can launch disk manager on core, that's the command that would do it. -
Vazgen over 11 yearsI cannot launch it from core. diskmgmt.msc unrecognized. Guess I'll just use a DVD. Thank you
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Grant almost 10 yearsThis is a good way to use your USB drive, but it is NOT a solution for installing the OS, which is what the question asks about. You can't RDP to a HyperV VM that has no OS installed on it yet...