Booting guest from USB drive

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kevinb

New Member
Nov 14, 2009
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Hey all, I'm trying to be able to get several virtual hosts to be able to boot from a usb flash drive so i can run image backup software on them. I was able to add an external usb hard drive to one of my vm's and it works fine, but i cant figure out how to make a usb drive visible from the F12 menu when the vm first starts up. Is there a way to do this in PVE? I would ASS-ume so since other environs like vmware and virtbox allow you to attach to those devices, but I'm not having any luck finding how to do it on PVE. TIA to all.

Kevin
 
Hmm I'm just new to Proxmox but interesting question. By thinking about that I find something that might be the way:

1. look to /etc/qemu-server

here you find the configfiles for the VM's you created by Webinterface.

2. you must put usb to this file.... when its working like quemu... in a quemu string there you must add -usb so you get the hosts Usb but in this configfile sorry I do not know the right synthax.

But I hope that helps


but may be I do not understand what you want to Do......
in a Boot up for example of Proxmox you could define other mountpoints in /etc/fstab ;-)
 
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Oerb,
Thanks for responding. I have usb parameters in the config file for the VM, but it doesnt make any hardware visible until after the VM boots, which doesnt help me trying to boot that vm off a flash drive. Im not sure what I might me missing or what else I have to do here. I'm hoping on of the proxmox moderators/gurus can shed some light on this. Thanks again.

Kevin
 
kevinb said:
Oerb,
Thanks for responding. I have usb parameters in the config file for the VM, but it doesnt make any hardware visible until after the VM boots, which doesnt help me trying to boot that vm off a flash drive. Im not sure what I might me missing or what else I have to do here. I'm hoping on of the proxmox moderators/gurus can shed some light on this. Thanks again.

Kevin
Click to expand...

Do you test a VM with less than 2 GB. May be that the USB coud only handle that. For an Linux System you may than create 2 GB Partitions and use them with LVM. In Windows hmmmm :-)
 
Or have you seen this ?

for example this Part of the side >>
How do I load a USB flash drive emulating it as the HDA so I can boot from it? (in Windows)

On Windows XP/2K you can try to boot from the flash drive like so: qemu -hda //./PhysicalDriveN ... where N is the drive number found in the disk manager.
 
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Oerb,
The VM is running Linux and the flash drive is 2GIG. It is recognized fine by a linux server that is NOT virtualized. I just need the instructions on how to make the USB drive visible in the VM when I hit F12 to bring up the boot options.

Kevin
 
Thanks Dietmar. Will there be? I think that would come in handy for people using Proxmox.

Kevin
 
kevinb said:
Thanks Dietmar. Will there be? I think that would come in handy for people using Proxmox.
Click to expand...

I can't imagine that many people want to boot from usb drives. Anyways, it depends if the qemu/kvm team implements it (better you ask on the qemu list).
 
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