Comments on: Boot VirtualBox machine from a USB flash drive

By: Gehre

Gehre — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:11:24 +0000

Well I know others have followed this how to but I came across the command “-register”. The man page data that described the error indicated that “-relative” is the correct command. I tried it and the process continued as indicated above. I’m having trouble getting my usb key to act like a disk drive and boot. Perhaps b/c its a “live usb”? ger

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:19:20 +0000

Tried this udev rules, works for me. Create a rule file under /etc/udev (this is Fedora) called 99-vbox-usb.rules with the following two lines:

KERNEL==”sd[c-f]“, OWNER=”rich”,GROUP=”rich”,MODE=”660″
KERNEL==”sd[c-f][0-9a-f]“, OWNER=”rich”,GROUP=”rich”,MODE=”660″

sda and sdb are my hard drives, so my usb devices start at sdc. Your device names may be different. Anyway, this works for me, allowing my userid (rich) read/write access the usb device without having to run VirtualBox as root or to give global access to the device file.

By: Gohst

Gohst — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:43:09 +0000

Ok tried again running VirtualBox as root, and it works as expected. Is there anyway to make it work without running VirtualBox as root?

By: Gohst

Gohst — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:39:05 +0000

I am getting an error when I try to do this. Here is the error “The medium usb.vmdk can’t be used as the requested device type” RESULT_CODE NS_ERROR_FAILURE 0×80004005
I am running Ubuntu 10.10 VirtualBox 4.0.8 and have my user in the disk group

By: Thomas

Thomas — Sat, 21 May 2011 20:14:28 +0000

If you don’t want to do this as root:

# sudo adduser yourusername disk

That way you get raw disk access for that user. That’s not too good either, but better than running as root.

By: How to boot from USB in virtualbox on Ubuntu : wire.less.dk

How to boot from USB in virtualbox on Ubuntu : wire.less.dk — Fri, 13 May 2011 20:24:44 +0000

[...] Three Wise Men http://www.twm-kd.com/software/boot-virtualbox-machine-from-a-usb-flash-drive/ Category: [...]

By: Karyn

Karyn — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 05:06:28 +0000

I’m trying to get VirtualBox to boot from an external hard drive. I’m running Ubuntu 10.10. I followed all of your instructions and the new vdi, located on the external, is attached to the guest vm in VirtualBox, but when I try to boot it up it says “Missing operating system.”

Any idea what might be wrong?

By: v01t

v01t — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:16:03 +0000

Hi, thanks…

work for me on Debian and VirtualBox 3.2.6

found next things…
do not need to run VirtualBox as root, need only create usbdisk.vmdk file as root and chmod it…

By: BigWhale

BigWhale — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:32:37 +0000

Good to know. :)

By: mve

mve — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 01:35:36 +0000

Tested on Linux Mint 9 still work’s great!

Thank you for shearing :)