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heavyd
Asked: 2009-06-28 00:06:10 +0800 CST

Does the VMWare Server 2.0 BIOS support USB?

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I have a VMWare Server 2.0 installation. I have a USB hard drive plugged into the host and the USB device attached to a VM. I would like to be able to boot from one of the partitions on my USB drive. Is this possible? From the bit of poking around I've done it looks like the BIOS doesn't support USB drives?

vmware-server bios usb boot

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    you would had better results searching for it on Google...

    here it is:

    No, it is not possible. The guest uses an Intel 440BX chipset, which existed long before bootable USB devices, and does not support such things.

    but you can upgrade to the new ESXi Server (free for developing environment) and that will boot from USB devices, all you need to do is follow this trick.

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  2. Rather than trying to boot directly from the USB drive, could you create a VHD on the USB drive and configure the VM boot off of that? If you did things this way, the VM would have no knowledge that it's actually running off of a USB stick.

    You'd probably have to be careful with unplugging the USB stick, but I'd think this should be possible. I'm doing something similar with eSATA drives and it's worked like a charm so far...(running stable for about two months now).

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  3. BTW: This is the reason why I switched to Virtualbox for desktop virtualization. This feature, RDP (mstsc/MS Terminal Services Client) access to the VM and Seamless mode.

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