Boot from a USB Flash Drive in VMware Player or Virtualbox

Boot from a USB Flash Drive in VMware Player or Virtualbox

It isn’t possible to boot from a USB Flash Drive under VMware player or VirtualBox but fortunately there is an easy workaround we can do.

First Download the PLoP boot manager (e.g. plpbt-5.0.14.zip), this supports USB booting.
Extract the ISO image plpbt.iso from the archive
Attach the extraced ISO image to you VMware or VirtualBox virtual machine as a CD/DVD
Boot the virtual machine from this virtual CD. (Both VMware & VirtualBox should automatically boot to the device, if not, press Esc at startup or virtual machine and enter the boot device selection menu and select USB device).

Once PLoP is started, it will give you a selection of devices to boot from including your USB Flash Drive.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

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