To update the BIOS on my linux server, I need to run a windows program. My idea was to quickly install windows to a USB drive so that I could just boot into a live windows environment. The installation is going painfully slow because USB drives are very slow to write.
My idea was to create a loopback device the same size as the USB drive and install Windows to that instead, then just dd
that image onto the USB. It'd probably be faster.
However, the program that I'm using to install Windows to a USB drive (called WinToUSB) will only install to (you guessed it) a USB Mass storage device. The loopback device that I created and passed into the Windows 7 guest OS that I'm running WinToUSB in presents it as a standard fixed disk. So WinToUSB refuses to try to install to this fixed disk.
So I'm trying to get virtualbox to present the loopback device (as a vmdk) to the guest OS as an emulated USB Mass Storage device so that WinToUSB will install windows to it so that I can dd
it to a real USB device and use that to flash my BIOS. What a freakin' Rube Goldberg machine!
Host OS: Arch
Guest OS: Windows 7
Virtualbox: 5.2.6