I run Mint15Mate and want to avoid wasting DVDs by using thumb drive to install distros to the free VirtualBox that comes in the repositories. Are there any free tricks for getting it done.
I have dementia and need a simple thorough bit of help. Thanx

Hi,

if you can get the iso file onto the host machine then you can tell virtual box to use that iso file as the cdrom drive of the guest machine. Click through the various virtual machine configuration dialogs to find it.

Then when you boot the guest machine you it will boot into the installer on the iso. No need for cdroms or usb sticks.

HTH,

Evo2.

Hi,

I just had a quick web search and found the following walkthrough:
http://geekyprojects.com/tutorials/h...in-virtualbox/
It might be a slightly different version of virtualbox to what you are using, but the steps should be the same.

Cheers,

Evo2.

"I just had a quick web search and found the following walkthrough:
http://geekyprojects.com/tutorials/h...in-virtualbox/
It might be a slightly different version of virtualbox to what you are using, but the steps should be the same."
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I believe I followed everything on this link: The ISO boots but double clicking on install icon of the Live cd desktop does nothing except sometimes create new folders which are not deletable and otherwise mouse is non productive non functional for installing the ISO to VBox or for that matter anything else. I'm running 1+ year old AMD A4-3300 on Gigabyte GA-A55M-DS2 motherboard with 1TB Seagate, 8GB PC3 1333mhz. Not sure what is going on other than maybe corrupt iso or Oracle crimped it.

Make your life simple and download the iso image and use it.


Most VM's don't allow you to boot directly from an attached usb at all or very easily. Usually people avoid burning a dvd/cd by simply using the iso image as a bootable choice in vm client settings.


When you create or modify the settings for your vm client, you have a choice of storage. See the virtualbox documentation for how to use an iso image.

Virtualbox may have changed how their virtual bios works to accommodate a boot from an attached usb. I tried it a number of years ago.

Here is a tutorial. http://www.zdwired.com/boot-from-usb...in-virtualbox/

A lot of times you can mount -o loop the iso image and copy the directory structure to a usb device. And a few mods to the bootloader and the /etc/fstab and it'll be bootable like if you burned the disc and booted from the disc. There's also easy2boot to just boot from the iso images on a usb drive in their iso form. I don't know how any of that is related to virtualization environments, but it's fairly simple to move linux across bootable devices. Even live disc versions of linux.

pretty sure I need the pay version of VBox to get all usb function.

No, you don't need the pay version. You can make some free vm's boot directly to a physical disk.

re~read what I said.

"pretty sure I need the pay version of VBox to get all usb function."


Why do you say that?

Hi,
I think you are talking about letting the virtual machine have access to the physical usb devices. That is unrelated to using an iso image file on the hard disk as the install image. The point is that no physical media, cd/dvd/usbstick, is required when installing an OS on a virtual machine.

Evo2.