VMWare – Bootable ESXi Key in 3 easy steps (Windows)

For whatever reason, my ability to successfully create bootable ESXi USB keys has been reliant on Mac OSX. As many know, OS X runs a flavor of BSD under the hood. Because of this, OSX has some great UNIX tools, one of those being dd. Unfortunately, Windows does not ship with an equivalent program. This is where WinImage comes in.

Here are the simple steps.

  1. Open the ESXi ISO using 7-zip. Double click image.tgz. KEEP DOUBLE CLICKING UNTIL YOU GET TO THE .dd file.
    image image
  2. Drag the .dd file from 7-zip to the Desktop. 7-zip will extract the .dd file (this can take a couple of minutes)
  3. Open WinImage (run as Administrator for Vista/Win7). From the menu, Disk >> Use Removable Disk J: – or whatever drive letter the destination USB key is on. Finally, from the menu Disk >> Restore virtual hard disk image on physical drive. NOTE: By default, you may not see the .dd file in the Open File dialog box. Select all files and the .dd file should appear. That’s it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 10:11 and is filed under VMWare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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