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How to Boot from USB Drive in VMware Workstation

Do you want to test the features of your USB Boot or NHV BOOT HDD Box without restarting your physical machine? Using a virtual machine is the optimal solution to save time and ensure data safety. In this article, nhvboot.com will provide a detailed guide on how to configure direct USB booting on VMware Workstation for research and computer rescue purposes

1. Run VMware as Administrator

Download VMware Workstation: https://vmware.com

Please ensure that you have installed VMware Workstation and have your NHV BOOT USB ready. In order for the software to properly recognize and interact with peripheral devices, you must launch VMware with the highest administrative privileges

Right-click the icon and select Run as administrator

2. Create a Virtual Machine and Configure USB Boot

Go to File and select New Virtual Machine… to start creating a virtual machine.
Select Typical (recommended) then click Next
In the Guest Operating System Installation window, select the option I will install the operating system later and click Next.
Select Microsoft Windows as the Guest Operating System. In the Version dropdown menu, choose Windows 10 x64, then click Next to continue
Enter a name for your virtual machine
Set the Maximum disk size (e.g., 20 GB) and select the option Store virtual disk as a single file, then click Next
Click Finish to complete the virtual machine creation process

Next, you need to configure the virtual machine hardware to boot from an external USB device

Open the configuration menu by selecting Edit virtual machine settings

Customize the hardware settings based on your computer’s available resources. In this guide, nhvboot.com uses 2 CPU cores and 4GB RAM, and removes the default hard disk since we are booting directly from USB

Select the Hard Disk entry and click Remove to delete it, then proceed to add your USB drive to the virtual machine
Then select Add
Select Hard Disk and click Next
Select NVMe and click Next
Select Use a physical disk (for advanced users) then click Next
Select the NHV BOOT USB drive from the list. To accurately identify the correct PhysicalDrive number, open the Run dialog or Start menu and type diskmgmt.msc to launch Disk Management
In this tutorial, the NHV BOOT USB is identified as Disk 1 on the host computer, so we will select PhysicalDrive1 in the VMware settings
Select PhysicalDrive1 from the dropdown list
Then click Finish
Click OK to complete the setup

Once the configuration is complete, power on the virtual machine

Start the VMware virtual machine by clicking Power on this virtual machine
Successfully booted into NHV BOOT WinPE in UEFI mode

By default, a VMware virtual machine created with Windows 10 x64 boots in UEFI mode. To switch to Legacy boot mode, please follow these settings

Above are the complete steps to run NHV BOOT USB directly on VMware Workstation. Hopefully, this small trick will make your research and work process more convenient.

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