It makes it easier to create the bootable drive in the first place, without the fuss of assigning that device as the VM's drive with the VBoxManage command's createrawvmdk option, which as the VirtualBox manual illustrates, is quite complicated and needs root permissions.Dual booting is a great way to get the best of both worlds of Windows and Linux.

But most hypervisors still default to a legacy BIOS, and mostly, these can't boot from real, physical USB drives on the host. It's easier and safer to create this inside a VM, and you don't run the risk of accidentally writing the bootloader to your main drive and ending up with a PC that won't boot unless the USB key is present. Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible ideaĪs an example of what you might use this for: you can install a Linux distro directly onto a USB key, and then have a universal bootable drive that will run on almost any PC.Roma, we've had un problema: When every flight's final destination is a date with Windows Boot Manager.Xen releases a new version 4.15 after a slightly delayed development process.Please do not touch the exhibits – or this tabletop Windows Boot Manager.Intriguingly, the separate Plop VHD Loader can also boot some OSes directly from MS hypervisors' VHD virtual-disk files, without using a hypervisor or starting another other OS first. The still-unfinished PBM6 supports UEFI as well as BIOS systems. Optionally, the boot manager can be installed directly onto your PC's hard disk, in which case it presents a list of partitions and will boot their contents.

None of this uses the PC's BIOS, so it doesn't matter if the firmware is blissfully unaware of the existence of these media. Plop Boot Manager 5: all right, the font and the starfield are a bit 1980s, but the functionality can be very handy.īoot PBM5, and it presents a menu, allowing you to boot the real target OS on the machine from a floppy, or from a CD-ROM, or from USB.

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