creating Windows 8 guest on OSX host from USB?

[travis2]

hi,

I have a bootable USB device that contains Windows 8. If I select the option key when starting my Mac, it is listed as a bootable device so I think it is properly formatted/configured. Unfortunately, when I try to create a new Virtualbox image, the USB does not show in my boot media list. I see the DVD drive and hard drive as potential boot devices.

Is this scenario (creating a windows image from a USB device) supported?

Seems this would be a normal scenario, but did not see it in the virtualbox doc and have not found a solution via search.

Thanks for a pointer.

--travis

[Perryg]

Booting from USB is not supported.

[travis2]

thanks for the info Perryg.

Is it possible to create a bootable DVD from my flashdrive? Anyone recommend a utility? Thanks.

--travis

[mpack]

Any disk imaging utility should be able to do it. I'm not a Mac user but I know the Mac does have a disk imager tool, though whether it works on USB drives I don't know. You could use dd to get a raw image, then use VBoxManage convertfromraw to make a VDI from the raw file.

Just be careful to image the entire drive, not just the mounted partition.

[JimBushWhack]

You can create a disk image from a bootable USB drive. Use Applications->Utilities->Disk Utility. With your bootable USB plugged in, open Disk Utility. Select the (probably) Mac OS X Install ESD file under the USB drive in the left pane. Then select File->New->Mac OS X Install ESD. This will bring up a dialog box so you can select where you want to store the disk image. Let the other settings choose the defaults.Then select Save and it will store the disk image at the specified location.

Once you have the disk image, you can setup VBox to boot from it. Or you can go ahead and make a boot DVD again using Disk Utility. Select Images->Burn. Then choose the new disk image and select Burn and insert a blank DVD when it tells you to.

Hope this helps.

[mpack]

I doubt the latter procedure will work. Imaging a hard drive will not in general produce an image that can be burned to a CD/DVD - the filesystems are entirely different.

Follow the procedure I gave earlier.