Its quite annoying that you can’t boot from a USB Drive in VMware Workstation. So here’s a simple workaround.
1. Download PloP boot manager http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#download
2. Extract the .ZIP
3. Attach the .ISO from the extracted .ZIP to your VM that you want to USB boot.
4. Making sure the USB stick is inserted into your PC, and attached to the VM.
5. When the PloP boot manager comes up, select “USB”.
Enjoy booting whatever you have on your USB drive.
So i’m using VMware Workstation 7.1 to run Ubuntu under my standard Windows 7 desktop. I’m trying to build ChromeOS to play around with, and i can’t get my USB stick to be seen on my VM.
As it turns out the VMware USB Arbitration Service on my host isn’t started, and in fact wont start. Turns out there is some USB filter driver causing the issue. I’m willing to bet it’s part of the driver for my new USB 3.0 Motherboard.
Anyway here is the simple fix.
Shut down Workstation.
Open the registry (Start > Run > regedit).
Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServiceshcmon.
Create a new key called Parameters.
In Parameters, create a new DWORD value entry named DisableDriverCheck, and then set the value to 1.
This works great and i can now pass USB to my VM.
Enjoy