Windows 8 Enterprise x64 Host & USB Stick Support

[noopykat]

I have spent 2 days trying to figure this out and I am at the end of my rope. This is driving me crazy because I was able to access the USB sticks When I was using Windows 7 Enterprise x64 and VMware Workstation 8. Now that I have upgraded to Windows 8, it appears to not work with VMware Workstation and Virtualbox 4.2.10. All that I am trying to do is boot up a Virtual Machine with a blank Virtual Hard Drive and have the VM boot from the USB stick which is a bootable stick that contains the install files. This USB stick works on non-VMs and when I plug it in to my computer, it is detected and can be read. When I connect it to the VM, I get nothing in the Boot Menu.

The Computer I have is a Lenovo x200 with a Core 2 8400, 8GB RAM and USB 2.0. I would have used Hyper-V except that the processor doesn't support SLAT (EPT) so I thought I would use Virtualbox or VMware. I have read through many posts talking about solutions where you enable AHCI but there is no O/S installed at this point. Therefore, I am not sure what to do.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I would like to hear them. When I boot up the VM and press F12, I do not see any USB sticks but I see them in the Filters I created and in the USB devices which are connected. I should mention that I tried to install the Virtualbox USB drivers with no results and all my USB entries in "Device Manager" on the Host are using the Microsoft drivers.

Thank you in advance for any help !

[mpack]

VirtualBox has never supported booting from a USB storage device. You can locate a working VM on a USB drive, but that doesn't sound like what you are trying to do.