Creating a bootable (installation) flash drive with VMWare

Nowadays, servers are shipped mostly without optical disc drives, so various methods for booting from USB drives become relevant. Of course, there are such things in the world as USB DVD-ROM, USB HDD with the function of virtualizing opto-drives from ISO files and other things, but the most common device that exactly every system administrator has is an ordinary USB flash drive. Here's how to create a bootable USB flash drive from the standard ISO VMWare and is discussed in this little note. So to the point.

First of all we install UNetbootin . In many GNU / Linux distributions, this software can be found in the standard repository, and if you use a non-standard distribution, or the OS from Microsoft or Apple, take a look at the program's website.

We also need the VMWare ESXi installation image which can be easily found on the company's website: downloads.vmware.com/d

We take the flash drive and format it in FAT32. Important! In theory, you can take the one that just has enough space (about 500 meters), but it's really better to take a clean formatted USB flash drive, especially since it may happen that the documents disappear.
')
Make sure that the flash drive is visible (for * nix: the disk is mounted; for Windows: a letter is assigned to the flash drive)

Launch UNetbootin and select the downloaded isoshnik by selecting the corresponding option of the Diskimage (ISO) option.



Select the type of disk “USB”, the letter of our flash drive, click OK and wait (about 5-20 minutes depending on your system).

After copying is finished, we open the USB flash drive and editor (the attention of Windows drivers - so that it understands the unix line, for example, notepad ++, sublime editor 2, etc.) open the file syslinux.cfg.

Replace the string DEFAULT menu.c32 with DEFAULT mboot.c32

Now you can boot from our flash drive!