how to make usb available to virtual machine

Question

trying to boot from usb in a virtual machine to install windows 11. some say take offline but that is not available for removable disk. some say disk part but that is the same reason

how do i make it available

Answer 1

Try the following

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/707320/attach-usb-device-to-hyper-v-guest-machine

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1009500/how-to-connect-a-usb-dongle-to-virtual-machine-hyp

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hth

Marcin

Answer 2

Everything is virtualized in the VM. In order to access host resources you have to run the host in an "enhanced" mode but that is dependent upon the guest OS supporting it, Windows does for example. But before the OS is actually installed I don't believe it is possible. In theory you could add a USB controller in the VM settings and then add the USB drive from there but I don't think it works for booting into an installer. Again, I could be wrong here but I've never heard of it working.

If you have a USB drive then that means you created bootable media and that means you either have an ISO already or you can get the ISO from the USB drive. Once you have the ISO you can add a virtual drive that is backed by the ISO and don't need to boot to the USB drive. Just create the virtual drive from the ISO and then boot to that. That's how you would normally install the OS anyway and it works for any OS as it doesn't require the guest OS to support any enhanced features.

Answer 3

Hi bob onit,

It's not supported to passthrough USB devices to Hyper-V VMs. You can use Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) to passthrough devices into VMs but it currently only support PCIe devices.

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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