Booting VMware Workstation from USB

I was in shocked over the weekend, when I found out that VMware Workstation do not support booting from USB devices, and I did check the BIOS but didn’t find anything . However there’s nothing to stop you booting to CD then using that to boot to USB right? So I did some digging around and found out there is a boot manager utility that allows you to boot from USB devices. It’s called Plop and you could find more information here.

Here are the instructions to get you up and running:

• Edit the virtual machine settings

• Add a USB Controller

• leave the setting alone, default settings will be okay

• click on CD\DVD, we need to add the Plop iso to boot into

• locate the Plop iso file

• boot into the Plop iso, you will see this 🙂 that’s a good thing

• make sure you USB device is connect to the VM not the host

• click on the USB device and click “Connect (Disconnect from Host)”

That’s it!