Is there a virtual machine with the ability to boot from existing bootable media?

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Kastrulya00012011-10-16 08:39:17

Boot disk

Kastrulya0001, 2011-10-16 08:39:17

Let me explain, I have a flash drive with Ubuntu, but I don’t always have a computer to boot from it, but there is a wonderful desktop with 3 monitors and a bunch of cores at work. I would like to insert this USB flash drive, start the virtual machine and specify this USB flash drive as a boot disk, but alas, I have not yet seen such functionality anywhere.

Have you come across similar software?

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5 answer(s)

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lexa0, 2011-10-16
@lexa0

Use kvm. It can boot virtual machines from real devices and is built into all modern kernels.

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MaxSergeev, 2011-10-16
@MaxSergeev

VMware definitely knows how to do this. From a flash drive, disk - yes, from any device.
It looks like this - the driver is installed in the main OS (along with the virtual machine). When you connect a virtual machine, you show that this flash drive is connected to a virtual machine. It disappears in the main system and appears in the virtual one.
Next, you indicate to the virtual machine that you need to boot from a USB flash drive.
All.

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WikiLeaks, 2011-10-16
@WikiLeaks

All virtual machines can do this, but I did it on virtualbox (I loaded the one copied from hdd win xp).
In general, you searched badly:
www.neowin.net/forum/topic/784138-howto-boot-existing-ubuntu-partition-using-virtualbox-inside-windows/

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Ivan Tikhonov, 2011-10-16
@polym0rph

Hyper-V can connect media directly. They just need to be offline in the main system.

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platerx, 2011-10-16
@platerx

VirtualBox definitely does. I myself have used this feature many times. But there is no way to do this in the GUI. This can only be done from the command line. Here is a link to the manual:
www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk
In short, you need to execute the following command: Replace \\.\PhysicalDrive0 with the desired device. This command does NOT copy data from the device, it just creates a vmdk file that contains something like a link to the real device. The resulting vmdk file is connected via the GUI as a regular disk image.
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename /path/to/file.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0