Booting VMWare Fusion from a USB Stick

Here’s a nice quick post on how to boot a USB stick in VMWare Fusion.

To do this, you use a program called Plop. It’s an ISO of a CD which allows you to boot from a USB Stick.

Download Plop from here: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html Just grab the first download link on that page.

Once you’ve downloaded and extracted that, go to VMWare and Click the button down the bottom of the VMWare Window for your CD Drive then Choose Disk Image. Select the plopbt.iso that you downloaded before.

Boot your VM and make sure you select to attach your USB Stick to the VM (from the buttons down the bottom).

If the boot CD doesn’t launch, look under “Advanced” in the settings for the machine and set it so it boots CD’s first.

Once the boot CD launches you can pick your USB stick, then away you go!

Also, here’s another quick hint for getting to the BIOS on VMWare.

It’s a little bit too fast to hit F2 to get into the BIOS, so you need to go to where your VM is (eg. ~/Documents/VMWare/Windows XP Pro.vmwarevm) and right click it and go to “Show Package Contents”. Right click on the .vmx file, Open With, Other and find Text Edit or your preferred text editor.

Then just add the line:

bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”

This will change itself to false after every time that you boot it, so if you need to get in again, you go back and change that to true again.

If this has been useful, leave a comment!

Ducky

EDIT:  Here’s a crazy little update about PXE Booting with VMWare Fusion.

I set the Networking to Bridged (So the machine gets its own IP rather than doing NAT). I boot the machine which seems to go straight into PXE Booting.  When the Zenworks thing is trying to PXE Boot, it’s looking for the Ctrl-Alt keys to be pressed. If you hold them down however, it doesn’t work.

The Trick is to hold them down and press Space as well. How weird is that?  I got this tip from here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/177309