Question on external USB RAW (physical disks not VHDX ) on HYPER-V

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks
for the Windows VM gurus -- HYPER-V question.

Can I attach a physical external USB SSD to a HYPER-V VM, install W11 on it and boot from that physical device whether or not it's set up as a "VHDX" file. Seems if one can overcome the "Virtual disk I/O" one can improve a whole slew of things. I can do it in QEMU/KVM and the USB device boots without issue when running the VM. The bootloader of course still needs to be recognized by the VM software but as it can boot from "Native" USB devices shouldn't be an issue.

Cheers
jimbo

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cereberus said:

You can certainly set up a vhdx file on an external drive and boot from it in a Windows 11 VM.

However, not sure if you can install W11 on an external drive (Windows To Go) and get Hyper-V to boot from it.

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SlicEnDicE said:

Yes

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jimbo45 said:

Hi there

I ve just tried it -- it won't boot from within the VM (Hyper-V) itself but it actually boots directly from the device so also an easy way to create a Physical W11 install from within a VM -- attach USB device, boot Windows installer, format HDD (disk part, convert GPT etc and all the other stuff) install Windows on it, boot loader and then boot the device.Not sure if this is any better than "Standard install" but I'm sure if I can "Poodle fake" the VM's boot loader it might work. I'm messing around with GRUB currently that can do all sorts of "Magic" stuff with this.

My target ideal is to be able to get 2 or 3 of these essentially Physical Windows OS'es to be able to run concurrently under the guise of a VM.

Cheers
jimbo

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