[ale] how do I boot a Virtualbox vm from a USB HDD

[Tim Watts]

Haven't actually tried this with a flash drive but I would start by
looking here:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#id2685036

You can boot from a partition. I've done this successfully to boot my XP
image from /dev/sda2. I would imagine a similar thing can be done with a
flash drive (which on my system appears as /dev/sdb).

I had to tweak the boot sector used by the VMDK so it would use an MBR
from the original XP install instead of Grub. But maybe that's
because /dev/sda is also the same drive as my main Linux image...

You need at least version 3.2. The version in the 10.04 repository is
3.1. Get it from the virtualbox site.


On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 14:38 -0400, Ron Frazier wrote:
> I may not be able to experiment with this for a few days, but I wanted to 
> go ahead and put this out to see what you guys think.  Thanks in advance 
> for responses.  I need to capture screen images to work on the slides 
> mentioned in the Linux Fest post above.  I need to capture them from a 
> virtual machine running in Virtualbox inside of Ubuntu 10.04.  Now, I know 
> I can do that by hitting print screen.  The catch is that the system I'm 
> testing is too large for CD or for the virtual HDD inside the virtual 
> machine.  I have to boot the virtual machine from an external USB HDD 
> attached to the host, but the virtual machine boot screen only allows 
> booting it from the virtual HDD, CD, or network.  Any idea how I can get 
> the virtual machine to boot from USB?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ron
> 
> --------------------------
> (PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to 
> call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy 
> mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)
> 
> Ron Frazier
> 
> 770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
> linuxdude AT c3energy.com
> 
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