VMware Fusion 2.x and booting USB Memory Sticks

This one of those posts where it’s more for ‘me’ and those Googling around. Today, I wanted to install FreeBSD on a memory stick for a server and then configure it in VMware before plugging into the internal USB slot of my server.

Installation was a breeze, booting was a little more difficult as the VMware BIOS doesn’t support booting off USB devices attached to it. To work around this I did the following

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            254.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                65.4 GB    disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS OSX External            499.6 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk2
   1:                    FreeBSD                         16.0 GB    disk2s1
$ /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmware-rawdiskCreator create /dev/disk2 1 SIXTEENGIG buslogic

So you can see in the diskutil list that the disk is on /dev/disk2 – what we then do is use vmware-rawdiskCreator to make a vmdk file represents it (something that Fusion won’t let you do in the UI). You then have to create a NEW VM and attach it to that, you cannot simply attach to an existing VM.

Then you have a nice bootable USB VM!