Does any of the vmware products support boot from USB option

[vijaymohan]

Does any of the vmware products support boot from USB option ? i want to boot my OS from USB
stick.

[AndrewAPrice]

Yes and no. You can forward any USB device into VMWare, including storage devices, so you can boot from them in the virtual machine. However, as far as I know, I haven't discovered how or if you could use an image rather than a physical USB device.

Is there a reason you chose USB? I selected a CD as the choice of my medium (700mb to play with in comparison with 1.4MB)

[vijaymohan]

i want to develop and test my experimantal OS on vmware making it to boot from USB. once it works fine i can use the same USB stick on other machines with out vmware.

[paulqddinh]

you may try to use the real machine if your computer supports booting from usb i think

[AJ]

Hi,

you may try to use the real machine if your computer supports booting from usb i think

At certain stages in the development cycle (like when you need to test lots of small changes quickly or need to test disk writing code), it's a lot quicker (and safer) to use virtualisation. The OP has said they will be using real machines once they have the OS working on VMWare.

@OP: I don't know a lot about USB booting, but IIRC, can't you use floppy or hard disk emulation on a USB drive? If so, you could test a hard disk image and then just switch to booting from USB with hard disk emulation (on a real machine) once you have it working.

Cheers,
Adam

[Grunt]

Here's an article that sais it's possible with some other software: http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=359

[AJ]

Hi,

Just had another thought. There are virtual drivers about that take an image file and present it to the file system as a drive letter (I'm using Vista). I have used ImDisk which does this for floppies, cd's and hard disks. You may be able to find something that does the same for USB drives - in fact, ImDisk has an option to mark any disk as "removable", which may do a similar thing?

Cheers,
Adam

[StephanvanSchaik]

Hi,

you may try to use the real machine if your computer supports booting from usb i think

At certain stages in the development cycle (like when you need to test lots of small changes quickly or need to test disk writing code), it's a lot quicker (and safer) to use virtualisation. The OP has said they will be using real machines once they have the OS working on VMWare.

@OP: I don't know a lot about USB booting, but IIRC, can't you use floppy or hard disk emulation on a USB drive? If so, you could test a hard disk image and then just switch to booting from USB with hard disk emulation (on a real machine) once you have it working.

Cheers,
Adam

Some BIOSes support USB through floppy emulation and HD-emulation, but also via CD/DVD-emulation like version six of the AwardBIOS. I think I've also read somewhere that some BIOSes support USB storages directly, although I am not entirely sure of that as I haven't seen any BIOS supporting something like that, but it might exist.

As for the topic, I know that VirtualBox supports USB booting through emulation, but I'm not sure if VMWare does the same. Grunt's link might be of interest though.


Regards,
Stephan J.R. van Schaik.

[paulqddinh]

i think all BIOSes now should support booting from USB
like booting from HDD, which means considering USB as hard disk
i dont know how those BIOS manufacturers think

[StephanvanSchaik]

i think all BIOSes now should support booting from USB
like booting from HDD, which means considering USB as hard disk
i dont know how those BIOS manufacturers think

A lot of them still don't and you shouldn't expect them to either. Why USB storages are usually emulated is simply because the only two main devices initially supported by the BIOS were the hard disk and the floppy disk. All other devices have been added and emulated as such later on. Examples of such are the CDs and the USB storages. Some BIOSes support some initially non-existent devices directly/natively nowadays though; e.g. CD/DVD booting without emulation a.k.a. El Torito/Bootable CD/DVD.


Regards,
Stephan J.R. van Schaik.