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Vazgen
Asked: 2012-11-04 19:26:30 +0800 CST

USB Thumb Drive not recognized in Hyper-V Manager

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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.

hyper-v-server-2012

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    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.

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  2. Finally I found a solution.

    1. Connect to your Hyper-V VM using RDP (not Hyper-V console)
    2. Before logging in, enable the USB thumb drive on the RDP client's Local Resources tab.
    3. Voila, your USB thumb drive shows on the VM's Windows Explorer

    More here.

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