Boot an ISO Image Directly From VMware Player
VMware Player is also a popular free virtualization software although we prefer VirtualBox because of the valuable snapshot facility. It can also be configured to automatically boot to an ISO image in a similar way, here’s how.
1. If you haven’t already, download and install VMPlayer (near the bottom of the download page).
2. Launch VMPlayer and click “Create a New Virtual Machine”. Select “I will install the operating system later” and then Next. For the Guest operating system select Other/Other (Important!) and click Next again.
3. Name the virtual machine ISOBoot and click Next. At the Disk Capacity screen you can leave the default of 8GB, this won’t be used as you are not using the virtual hard drive. Click Next -> Finish and close VMPlayer, things like usable memory can be edited later on
4. This method is pretty much the same as VirtualBox, download the batch file below and either drop the ISO file onto it or use it as a command with an argument of the ISO filename.
Download ISOboot_VMware.bat
To add the context menu, copy the BAT file to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player
or for 32-bit systems use
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player
Download the Zip below, open it and run the Install registry file to import the data into your registry, use the included x86 or x64 file depending on your host system.
Download ISOboot_VMware_Context.zip
If everything works you will have a right click entry to directly launch a clicked on ISO file using VMware Player.
Like the VirtualBox setup above, the context entry won’t work if other software has previously taken over the ISO file type and you will need to check the registry to see which file type needs changing and then edit the registry file.
Final Note: Although they are much larger than MobaLiveCD and need installing, apart from the obvious of being able to run your own virtual operating systems, both VirtualBox and VMPlayer have the advantage that the virtual machine you are using for ISO booting can be configured to run at a similar speed to the host computer. You can also enable or disable options such as networking and sound, and also allocate graphics memory, system memory and the number of CPU cores etc.
MobaLiveCD on the other hand can be quite unreliable and incredibly slow to boot images because it emulates low end hardware and hasn’t been updated for years, meaning VirtualBox or VMware Player could be big time savers if you find yourself testing Linux distros or bootable ISO images often.
1. If you haven’t already, download and install VMPlayer (near the bottom of the download page).
2. Launch VMPlayer and click “Create a New Virtual Machine”. Select “I will install the operating system later” and then Next. For the Guest operating system select Other/Other (Important!) and click Next again.
3. Name the virtual machine ISOBoot and click Next. At the Disk Capacity screen you can leave the default of 8GB, this won’t be used as you are not using the virtual hard drive. Click Next -> Finish and close VMPlayer, things like usable memory can be edited later on
4. This method is pretty much the same as VirtualBox, download the batch file below and either drop the ISO file onto it or use it as a command with an argument of the ISO filename.
Download ISOboot_VMware.bat
To add the context menu, copy the BAT file to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player
or for 32-bit systems use
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player
Download the Zip below, open it and run the Install registry file to import the data into your registry, use the included x86 or x64 file depending on your host system.
Download ISOboot_VMware_Context.zip
If everything works you will have a right click entry to directly launch a clicked on ISO file using VMware Player.
Final Note: Although they are much larger than MobaLiveCD and need installing, apart from the obvious of being able to run your own virtual operating systems, both VirtualBox and VMPlayer have the advantage that the virtual machine you are using for ISO booting can be configured to run at a similar speed to the host computer. You can also enable or disable options such as networking and sound, and also allocate graphics memory, system memory and the number of CPU cores etc.
MobaLiveCD on the other hand can be quite unreliable and incredibly slow to boot images because it emulates low end hardware and hasn’t been updated for years, meaning VirtualBox or VMware Player could be big time savers if you find yourself testing Linux distros or bootable ISO images often.
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