Use a virtual machine to run Linux from a USB drive on Windows.
Use a virtual machine to run Linux from a USB drive on Windows.
I'm checking for ways to start a Linux distribution already set up on an SSD connected through USB. The SSD is linked via a SATA → Thunderbolt adapter and is accessible from BIOS. You're exploring using a Windows VM to access it without needing a full reboot.
Make sure the disk is selected as the boot device inside your virtual machine settings.
I suggest checking if your current setup supports VMware Workstation or VirtualBox, as those are more compatible with older versions of VMWare Player.
Sorry, I'm not a windows user so I wouldn't know which option would be the best, but I believe it should be possible to select an USB device as the boot disk under the hardware options for a VM.
VirtualBox is a great choice for creating virtual machines due to its ease of use. For starting a VM from a USB, follow the guide at the provided link.
Linux doesn't damage flash drives. You're likely referring to updating Linux on a drive that Windows no longer recognizes or displays reduced capacity. This happens because Linux uses a different filesystem (like ext4) that Windows can't understand. To make it work on Windows, reformat it back to NTFS. You've been using Linux ISO images and installing Linux onto flash drives for a while now.
In my experience, setting up an OS—especially with F2FS and Debian—can cause issues if the flash drive isn’t properly formatted. I tried using a virtual machine with the .vbox image on USB, but the format was incorrect (either ext4 or FAT32/NTFS). The drive appeared briefly in Windows or Linux but couldn’t be formatted afterward. In the VM, I noticed frequent read/write errors in the console before it stopped working.
Flash storage has a short life span; it's probably damaged by frequent writes and reads while the operating system runs on it, much like how cheap SD cards fail after heavy use.