# Install FreeBSD onto USB drive from VM



## router54g (Feb 19, 2012)

For a few reasons I want to install FreeBSD onto a flash drive. Not boot from a flash drive, but perform a full install onto the drive as if it were the main hard disk. The problem is I have no CD drive available, and no additional USB drives from which to boot the FBSD FreeBSD install ISO. 

Would it be at all possible to mount the USB disk within a VM like VirtualBox, perform the install from within the VM, and have a working FBSD FreeBSD install on the USB drive from which to boot natively? I already have a working FBSD FreeBSD 64-bit VM under VirtualBox if this would require the install environment to have guest additions. 

Thanks for any help.


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## dave (Feb 19, 2012)

It is possible to create a virtualbox instance that uses a physical disk as its hard drive.  You can then boot the virtual box with the ISO file, and install to your physical disk, no problem.  I have done this successfully to install FreeBSD on a CF card attached to a USB card reader.  See Using a raw host hard disk from a guest.


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## router54g (Feb 20, 2012)

This just hits an "I/O" error when attempting to write the partition information to the disk, from a Windows 7 host.


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## router54g (Feb 20, 2012)

Actually nevermind, I just needed to nuke the disk's existing partitions and MBR from diskpart. Seems to work fine now, if at dismal performance.


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