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I have made a bootable USB stick which successfully installs Windows 7.

I'd also like to use it with VM Ware, which only recognises DVD drives.

Can I mount my bootable USB drive to emulate being a DVD drive?

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Not that I know of. But you can create an ISO image from it using ISORecorder, then mount it with a tool like Virtual Clonedrive to achieve the same effect.

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You can mount the ISO directly as a DVD drive in VMWare, no need of Virtual CloneDrive. – Snark Oct 13 '09 at 3:21
Yup. doesn't hurt to have a virtual DVD drive on the host though, they come in very handy. – John T Oct 13 '09 at 3:37
Yeh, I had already tried that but I couldn't find a way to extract the "bootable" part of the USB stick. ISORecorder doesn't seem to do this unless I'm missing something.. – Josh Comley Oct 13 '09 at 8:00
Try using dd from a Linux liveCD, isorecorder probably can't grab the boot information as you said. – John T Oct 13 '09 at 12:02
the "bootable" part of the USB stick isn't the same as the "bootable" part of a CD/DVD (different sector sizes, for one thing). even if you manage to copy the boot stuff off the USB stick, a CD-emulator probably won't be able to boot from it. you need to create a bootable CD version of your USBstick (just burn to ISO instead of an actual disc). – quack quixote Oct 28 '09 at 1:08
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No, is the answer I seem to have found. Not without using an ISO image.

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