virtualbox boot from usb in windows guest

This will make sure the IDE controller is taking the redirected USB drive as boot drive, but also activating the second drive. Repeat the same steps for the existing hard drive, setting the Location parameter to 1.So far, so good! Now, to make sure the virtual machine is effectively booting from the USB drive, select the virtual hard drive “ Physical drive” on the left (as shown in the above image), and modify the Location parameter to 0.

Next to that, we select Physical Hard Disk, which shows our offline disk of 32Gb in size. To achieve this, go into the Settings of the VM specifically, the IDE Controller 0 section, where we chose to add a hard drive.

Next, we’ll select this USB drive as a virtual hard drive for our VM.

This can be achieved by right-clicking on the disk and selecting Offline.

Before we can “redirect” the USB drive as a virtual hard drive in our VM, we have to make this drive offline.

Your USB drive will be shown as “Basic/Online” (32Gb drive in my example, split up in 2 partitions).

From your physical Hyper-V Server, go to Disk Manager.

Booting a Windows Server Hyper-V VM to a USB Although I’m writing this from the standpoint of using a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V environment, this also works with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.

So I decided to share the specific steps with you on how to boot a virtual machine from a USB drive in your own environment. The idea for this article came to mind while I was writing my recent post about Windows To Go, which outlines how you can boot into a fully operational Windows 8 work environment from a USB drive.

Virtualbox boot from usb in windows guest