Boot USB Drive in Fusion 5

The BIOS for VMs in VMware Fusion 5 does not seem to let you boot a USB disk, which say, is handy for configuring ESXi after you have installed it to a USB key, but before dropping said key into your homelab. Inconvenient at best… to get around this:

  1. Download Plop Boot Manager from here
    image
  2. Mount the ISO and the USB disk on the VM
  3. Once booted, choose USB:
    image

Thanks to this 2010 post on the same.

4 thoughts on “Boot USB Drive in Fusion 5

  • Fusion 5 allows you to boot from a USB drive when you use EFI instead of the legacy BIOS. Add
       firmware = “efi”
    to your .vmx file to play with that.

  • Your comment does not make sense, or address the issue– the .vmx file for your mac/osx virtual machine will already have this line in it; this is because macs boot by default via efi, including the mac vm in vmware. the problem is getting your mac vm to boot from usb drive.

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