emulate usb drive as virtual disc android

Yes, we want to wipe the device and the progress should begin. Now we can run Rufus and it should detect the USB disk, ensure you pick the correct one then set up as below (be sure the Create a bootable disk option is using ISO Image), select the ISO for ESXi then hit Start.

Just hit Cancel here as Rufus will do this for us. In my case, I run Windows as a VM, so I attached the USB device to the VM and it shows up as such. Next, we are going to click on the image we just created and choose Writable USB as the type, this will then mount the device, as a writable USB to your Mac/PC/VM. You can view image creation progress in the notification center. Next we will give it a name and a size - this is just for your own reference, as you can see mine is called and i’ve given it a size of 768MB which I know is larger than the ISO that will be extracted to it. this will essentially create a blanked out space on the internal storage of the phone to which you can write an ISO image. So, start your Android phone, install the DriveDroid app, click the + button and hit Create blank image. I’m not going to nerd out too much, but Rufus is absolutely flawless, I have never used a program that makes bootable USBs so easily, without all that Floppy disk ROM faff.

USB Data cable (yeah, got bitten by the “power only” USB cables).

In case you haven’t gathered by now the plan is to use the Android phone as a USB storage device to boot the servers off and install my ISO(s). So in my impatience I wanted a solution and this is what I came up with I’m bad for keeping old tech around incase they one day may come in handy again - and my old Samsung Galaxy Nexus fit the bill perfectly - so after an hour on the charger and years of updates being installed it was ready to rock.

I don’t have any USB drives because I use cloud storage for that kind of thing and they had CD drives - what is this, the dark ages, does my mac look like it has room for a CD burner? No iDRAC Ent means no virtual console, or virtual media.

While the iDRAC Ent cards were on their way to me I couldn’t help but want to install ESXi on these things so they were ready to go (old Dell R610s are seriously good value now). I found myself in the position recently whereby I had two hosts I bought off eBay (as one does for labs), they arrived, I had great plans… But no iDRAC Enterprise :(

Emulate usb drive as virtual disc android