At a recent conference for Mac® IT admins, I was asked, “Can you run a VM from an external drive?”
USB Floppy Drive,Chuanganzhuo 3.5' USB External Floppy Disk Drive Portable 1.44 MB FDD USB Drive Plug and Play for PC Windows 10/7/8, Windows XP, Vista,for Mac (White) Overview:This USB external floppy disk drive is a Ultra Slim external portable floppy disk Drive. PC floppy drives can still read ONLY the 720/1.4 MFM disks, and CANNOT read GCR-formatted (Mac) disks. Eventually, USB-based floppy drives came on the market, but Apple never sold them and by the time they arrived Apple had abandoned floppy drives. The reason a floppy drive won't work on mac is most likely due to the lack of drivers (Apple never had 3.5' floppy drives - not even in the first iMac). As a result the chances the floppy drives work with Mac OSX is minimal.
Short answer: “Yes, absolutely. I do this all the time.”
Longer answer: You have always been able to run a Parallels Desktop® for Mac virtual machine from an external drive. In Parallels Desktop 13, this performance has been significantly improved, if https://taskrenew620.weebly.com/parallels-for-mac-high-sierra.html. your external drive is an SSD drive connected to your Mac by Thunderbolt.
So that you can see what it’s like to run a VM from an external drive, I made a short video. (See video 1). I have deliberately not changed the video playback speed, or deleted any portion of it, in order for you to get an accurate “feel” of the VM’s performance.
Video 1: Running a Windows 10 VM from an external drive
While this is subjective, I think you’ll agree that this VM’s performance looks the same as a VM on the Mac internal storage. For the definitive word on virtual machine performance on a Mac, see this comprehensive MacTech report.
As you can see in the video (at 00:22), Parallels Desktop does alert you when you boot up a VM stored on an external drive. This is so you do not inadvertently disconnect the external drive while the VM is running. (See figure 1.)
Here are the details about the setup for this video:
Parallels Desktop 13.2.0
Touch Bar™ MacBook Pro® with 16 GB RAM running High Sierra 10.13.1 (with all patches)
External Drive: SSD2go PKT (1 TB, with USB-C connection)
Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (version 1709) with all patches
Microsoft Office 2016 Version 1710 (Build 8625.2127) with all patches
Microsoft Edge 41.16299.15.0
The easiest way to build a VM that can be used on an external drive is to create that VM in your shared VM folder. Then just move the VM’s pvm file to the external drive, as detailed in this Knowledge Base (KB) article, How to run a virtual machine from network or external mass storage. (If you want to move a VM from your personal VM folder to an external drive, you may need to adjust the VM’s permissions as detailed in the KB article, How to share virtual machine with several user accounts on a Mac.)
I hope this helps you manage the limited storage on your Mac, since you can move an infrequently used VM to an external drive and still use it without a noticeable performance penalty.
https://taskrenew620.weebly.com/parallels-desktop-for-mac-pro-edition-download.html. Let us know in the comments if you store some VMs on an external drive and what your experiences have been.
External Floppy Disk Drive For Windows 10
If you want to try running a VM from an external drive with Parallels Desktop 13, feel free to get started with our free, full-featured 14-day trial.
Active3 years, 8 months ago
A couple of years ago it was not possible to boot from USB on every computer (where the BIOS doesn't support this). There was a tiny ISO image which allows for booting from a USB stick.
Now we have the same situation with software for virtual machines such as VMWare, Parallels Desktop and this ISO is useful again. I use Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac OS X which doesn't have an option to boot from USB or USB stick.
I have following real world situation:I have HDD with Linux installed. It is not like Live CD, it is already configured by me. I use it on my computer at work to boot environment I like and I use it at home to have same environment.Sometimes I work with Mac OS X and want to download something for my Linux (such as updates and new software) and configure something if I need.
I can't boot from it using Parallels Desktop or VMWare because BIOS in this VMs doesn't recognize my USB or it can't be attached before I run my VM.
Where can I find an ISO that would allow me to boot from a USB stick?
Eir Nym
External Floppy Disk Drive For Mac
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4 Answers
Add a new Hard Disk to your VM and then select the option to use a physical disk. Afterwards just choose the disk that corresponds to the USB disk, you can even use the option to select individual partitions to deduce what is the actual # for your USB drive.
ner0ner0
Use the Plop boot manager:
- From the download page, download 5.0.13.zip
- Unzip the file
- Make your VM's virtual DVD/CD drive use plpbt.iso as the image
- Connect your USB drive to the VM's virtual hardware
- Boot your VM from the ISO
- In the boot screen select you want to boot from USB
- Continue the boot from USB
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I've found what I want! Google search string was 'boot from iso old bios'
Eir NymEir Nym31722 gold badges44 silver badges1515 bronze badges
If you want a small image you should check out damn small linux, you can find some pretty detailed instructions here. https://taskrenew620.weebly.com/blog/parallels-for-mac-cpu-usage.
JohnJohn