I wanted to boot a Virtual Machine from an USB Stick but even though you can Connect USB devices to VMWare you cannot boot from it.

It can be done however using a boot manager that is able to perform a boot from USB media. I used Plop Boot Manager.

Download one of the stable releases (I used 5.0.11-2) and extract plpbt.img from the archive and mount this (don’t forget to select the Connect at power on option) and when booting press Esc for the Boot Menu.

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This would be a good time to Connect the USB device to the Virtual Machine, right click the USB device in the bottom bar:

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And select the Connect option:

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Click OK on the warning message:

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Now press Enter in the VMWare Boot Menu and select USB in the Plop Boot Manager:

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And that’s it, we boot from USB, in my case the USB stick also has a Boot menu:

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