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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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  • Check this article from How To Geek. It's a little bit of a hack, but it should work for what you are trying to do.
    – Rabbid10
    Jul 27, 2012 at 16:19

2 Answers 2

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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, 2009 at 3:21
  • Yup. doesn't hurt to have a virtual DVD drive on the host though, they come in very handy.
    – user1931
    Oct 13, 2009 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.. Oct 13, 2009 at 8:00
  • Try using dd from a Linux liveCD, isorecorder probably can't grab the boot information as you said.
    – user1931
    Oct 13, 2009 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). Oct 28, 2009 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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  • Maybe it can be tricked by having a symlink with somefilename.iso pointing to the device node name of the USB stick.
    – Skaperen
    Jul 27, 2012 at 19:07

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