Install VMWare ESXi 4 to USB Drive, or to HDD without a CD Drive

November 10, 2011 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

So I’ve got a newish PC here that I want to setup with VMWare ESXi.

The down side is that I can’t seem to get it to boot off a USB CD-ROM drive, and I don’t have any SATA DVD Drives handy to pop in.

Thankfully, I’ve managed to find a relatively easy way to get ESXi installed and up and running!

All you need is Physdiskwrite (Dont bother with the GUI), the ESXi ISO, and something like WinRAR to extract everything.

The whole process should only take about 3-4 minutes.

First off, extract everything from the ISO. In my case, I’ve got ESXi 4 Update 2.

There’s a file, image.tgz, extract that to your HDD.

Then, you’ll have a directory structure created: image\usr\lib\vmware\installer\

In there you’ll have a file: VMware-VMvisor-big-261974-x86_64.dd.bz2

Extract that file to somewhere on your HDD. In my case, because I was playing around with other things, I made a folder C:\dd

Extract Physdiskwrite to the same location

Now, you want to open an Administrative command prompt. You may need to make a shortcut to cmd.exe and right-click on it to choose “Run as Administrator”.

Change into the directory with physdiskwrite and the VMWare .dd file

Now, run:

diskpart

From within the disk partitioning tool, run:

list disk

This will show you all your drives and their drive number. In my case, I’m wanting to install VMWare to the 80GB HDD (Disk1):

Type “exit” to quit the disk partitioning tool

Now, you want to use physdiskwrite to write the image to the HDD, with a command like:

physdiskwrite.exe -u -d 1 VMware-VMvisor-big-261974-x86_64.dd

Replace the “-d 1” with your applicable Drive number that you discovered previously.

That’s it, you should now be able to throw that HDD into your VMWare machine, and have it boot!

booting, cdrom, dvd, esxi, usb,