Boot from and run virtual OS from USB

Villain

Ok not sure if this is possible or easily achieved but I think it is possible.

If I have VMDK file of a OS say Vista or XP I know I can use VMPlayer to run that OS inside windows but what I want to achieve is the following.

Boot from a USB Key/HardDrive directly on boot and run a VMDK file i.e. run OS from USB. So in essence if I configure a Virtual machine with all the bits and pieces I want, I can run that configured OS on any PC that allows booting from USB.

Does anyone how this can be achieved?

Overheal

In theory you would need to have the OS configured to a machine's hardware wouldnt you? That changes as soon as you jump from one machine to the next.

Villain

Virtual machines will run on most hardware, that wouldn't be an issue unless the machine's hardware didn't have a good enought spec i.e. ram & cpu

Capt'n Midnight

booting windows from a USB is problematic, it does a lot of writing to the registry and such so you have a real wear levelling problem

windows license as everyone knows is per machine ( or in the case of Vista per partition) so microsoft have no reason to support booting form a removable disk and don't.
Stop 0000007B is a very common bluescreen you get by minor changes in boot chipset

maybe look at something like bart PE
or
get a live linux/bsd/solaris CD for boot up and then run a virutal copy of windows on that - again beware that it's a licensing nightmare as OEM licenses on the original machine probably won't cover the virtual OS then

Villain

Cheers Capt'n, yea I was thinking more along the lines of using some linux boot app which runs a VMPlayer type app that allows you to run Virtual Machines.

Villain

Got it working, well slowly but working.

I created a bootable USB Ubuntu 7.10 drive by copying the LiveCD, I then installed VMPlayer and opened the virtual VMDK file which had XP Pro on it.

Its slow but I'm using two USB drives 1 2gb for booting Ubuntu and then a 4gb one which has the Virtual XP machine on it. Its running even with networking but its slow, I think this might be due to Ubuntu not supporting USB2.0 i.e. the drive is running at USB1 or it may be because the USB drive with the VMDK file on it is only FAT rather than FAT32.

I tried using NTFS drive but got errors because Ubuntu doesn't like mounting NTFS, I think I can get around that error.

Just thought I'd post it up not sure if anyone is interested.

Ghost Train

Interesting to hear that it can be done. Might have a go at something similar

One thing I find with windows vmware, maybe someone knows the reason, i can run vmware fine with xp vmdk files located on a usb hard drive, performance is perfect, but when I copy the files to a usb flash drive the performance is really sluggish. I know the flash drive read and write speed might be a fair bit slower, but should the virtpc be running 10-15 times slower? flash drive reads at 25mb/s and writes at 8mb/s

Villain

Good question, I've just reformated my 4gb USB key to fat32 to see if it improves speed, I will also try an external 2.5" ide harddrive through a USB Caddy with FAT32 and see how performance is.

Villain

Making it FAT32 made it worse, I put the VMDK files on an external ide drive with a USB caddy and speed was excellent, but I can't get networking going, I even tried going back to the first USB key but networking wouldn't work in VMPlayer either, I didn't change anything weird.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has got such a thing working?

Villain

Has anyone used MokaFive bare metal?? Looks like it may acheive what I want?

Villain

Well what I asked at the start is possible and this post is evidence, I am posting from a Dell GX620 that has no hard drives attached internally or externally, all I have is a 4GB usb key and which I booted from and XP is now running on that.

So basically I have a PC in my pocket, surprised this hasn't got more attention, as if you setup an XP Install with everything you need and then P to V it using VMWare converter or the like and your hard drive dies you can run from a USB key until your drive is replaced.

Fionn101

Excellent stuff Villain, good work Sir !

I've been watching this intently ,

mandrake linux was all the rage for booting off of a small media wasn't it ? usb boot and cd-rom boot as far as I recall.

If you have a handy howto guide then I'd like to get this going also.

*rounds of applause*

Villain

Cheers Fionn101, I'm still working on this but was too busy the last day or two to get any more done.

I have two ways of doing it at the moment.

1 is to boot Ubuntu 7.10 from a USB key, on the first boot install VMWare Player for linux manually then run any VM image from a external 2.5"hard drive via a usb caddy.

One issue this has is that when you move from one piece of hardware to another with a different Garphics card you need to run the command sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to reset the graphics settings although I'm sure there is a way or setting this to vesa mode to stop you having to do that, but its years since I did any decent linux work.

2 Use Moka5, this product is the business, really is, it seems to have been developed by people with strong connections to VMWare and it has used VMWare player excellently. They have a baremetal product which allows you boot from usb and run virtual machines which you can download from their site. I have only tried one or two but I haven't managed to get my VMDK file to run through Moka5 yet, although support are emailing me and I'm sure I can get it working once I have a bit of time.

I'll post an update and some details when I get some more time, any questions feel free to ask.