Boot direct from USB with VBox

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SteveSi

New Member
Aug 28, 2013
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You have been able to boot direct from a bootable USB drive using VBox for some time now, but only with volume read-only access because Windows stops VBox from gaining full rd/wr access to the USB drive. This means that any writes made to the USB drive volume(s) did not actually physically work.
Now however, DavidB on reboot.pro has released a 'Virtual Machine USB Boot' utility which dismounts the USB drive - runs VBox - and then re-mounts the USB drive when you quit Vbox. This means you can now fully emulate booting from (for instance) a persistent linux USB drive, etc.
Checkout here for details and here for DavidB's app.
Also works with QEMU too.