Is it possible to live-boot VirtualBox from a USB flash drive?

Posted by bw. on Super User See other posts from Super User or by bw.
Published on 2012-09-23T23:02:04Z Indexed on 2012/09/24 15:40 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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virtualbox

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virtual-machine

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portable

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windows-pe

To clarify, I'm not asking if you can boot from USB from within VirtualBox.

I would like to make a portable version of Windows 7 that I can run from a USB drive on any machine. I'm putting a distro of Linux on my laptop, but I manage a Windows domain at work so I'd like an easier management solution than trying to use Linux tools to interface with a Windows DC(as RDP to a DC is not always an option).

The reason I'm inquiring about VirtualBox... I plan on carrying this portable installation with me and using it on multiple machines, so I would like to avoid driver conflicts (which I imagine would happen if I only installed Windows on a flash drive).

Basically, I need a way to boot an installation of Windows 7 from USB that still allows me to install/remove/update programs as if it were installed on a standard hard drive, and not freak out over different hardware configurations.

Please help, superusers!

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