Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Discussions related to using VirtualBox on Mac OS X hosts.
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Tyrheon
Posts: 7
Joined: 7. Apr 2013, 04:10

Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Post by Tyrheon »

I have found numerous material on how one may do this natively on WINDOWS and even on LINUX, but not for MAC OSX (I run 10.7.5)

I have my USB ready to go; it is now a boot disc; I just can't get VirtualBox to recognize it as such. I know it has something to do with making VirtualBox "think" it's a physical disc, but there's not article and no post I can find that says how to do this on Mac natively.

All I want to do is install Windows 7 from a USB onto VirtualBox while running Mac OS X natively. If there's any way to do this, please let me know.

Thanks.
noteirak
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Re: Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Post by noteirak »

Virtualbox does not support booting from USB.
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Tyrheon
Posts: 7
Joined: 7. Apr 2013, 04:10

Re: Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Post by Tyrheon »

I know that, but people have done it before. Does anyone know how to convert tricks like this:

http://www.dallagnese.fr/computers-it/b ... tualbox-4/

into something I can do on Mac?
Tyrheon
Posts: 7
Joined: 7. Apr 2013, 04:10

Re: Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Post by Tyrheon »

It's not a big deal if I can the .iso to boot instead, a la my later post. I didn't know I could get an .iso when I made this thread...
noteirak
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Joined: 13. Jan 2012, 11:14
Primary OS: Debian other
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Re: Make a USB with Windows 7 on it run like a BootDisc?

Post by noteirak »

Just to clarify for other people, what you linked is a way to get around USB booting by presenting a regular disk to the VM via the mean of a VMDK and raw device access.
This is far from USB booting and is an expert feature which can lead to severe data loss if done incorrectly.

On th other hand, regular USB booting is harmless and actually does not fiddle with your disks until you start an installation or so, but is not supported by Virtualbox.
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