How do I check if an USB drive is bootable?

virtual-machine usb-drive
lolesque picture lolesque · Sep 5, 2012 · Viewed 17.2k times · Source

I just created an USB drive and would like to check if it's correctly bootable without rebooting my actual computer. How should I do?

Answer

lolesque picture lolesque · Sep 5, 2012

Under Linux, you have to know which device path got the drive with for example with dmesg | tail after insertion, let's assume it's /dev/sdb.

Qemu

sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdb or sudo qemu-system-x86_64 -hda /dev/sdb for 64 bits.

VirtualBox

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/usb.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdb
sudo chmod 666 /dev/sdb*

then add ~/usb.vmdk as a disk in a VM and boot on it

Don't hesitate to add other ways to do.

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