I ran out of DVDs and am tring to figger out how to install Mint 15 XFCE in Virual Box using a USB flash drive. Aint found it on the net yet so here I iz.
Just doesn't seem possible in my mind.
Rig: Gigabyte MB with A4 3300 & 8gb pc1300 1tb hard drive and dvd burner.....Thanx %)SW

Hi there,

if you've got a bootable USB, you must've created it somehow, so I assume you have the ISO image file somewhere.
So ... why not simply mount that ISO in VirtualBox?

[X] Doc CPU

Virtual machines have a way to simply use an ISO file as Doc CPU points out. You download some iso image and use it like you'd use a normal real cd/dvd.


I guess it could be possible to boot from a usb device or maybe even a shared folder in a VM. It would not be easy for a newbie.

Some iso's are actually hybrid and can be mounted like a normal virtual disk but still complex.

I'd also suggest that you consider a pre-made virtual system. Some distro's offer them and as well as some other sites.

There are also bootable floppies for many distro's still and network boot media.

Doing some odd tricks like grub4dos or such to boot to an ISO directly may also work. All of it is complex.

As has been pointed out if you have a .iso file then your easiest solution is to boot the VM from that -- there's no need to burn to a real drive when you're using .iso files with VirtualBox.
You can, however, boot from USB in VirtualBox by creating a virtual hard drive pointing at the real USB stick -- I can't find the Linux instructions I found but the principal is given here in this Windows example:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-a-...in-virtualbox/
I found it good for playing with a real instance of Puppy that I wanted to use with persistence in real machines and the VM.

I did this earlier today using the suggestions at the link below. It has instructions for windows and Linux. It didn't work as easily as it was supposed to and unfortunately, I didn't keep good notes. One thing to be careful of is to make sure you get the right drive, in the example it is /dev/sdb which may not be the case. I had to run the command as root even though it was created in a /home/user directory. Also I was not able to access the usb.vmdk file in VBox which was in the .VirtualBox directory. There is a link on that page to the source where the person who wrote it obtained the info for an earlier version of VBox.

http://www.dallagnese.fr/computers-i...-virtualbox-4/

As stated above, if you just want to install one distribution, it is a lot easier to just boot the iso file. If you have a number of distributions on a flash drive, this method would work.

Choose a Virtual CD/DVD disk file... and point it at the ISO.

Boot the appliance and press F12 then CDRom and go.