Testing a bootable USB within Windows is easy with QEMU, but it lacks resources to test anything except basic boot. A little program called Virtual Machine USB Boot worked great with VBox until recently. I can't get it to work lately, so I tried VMware and found it to be easy. The Virtual Box method below also works great. I had one USB drive that only booted Ventoy to grub but booted E2B just fine but booting an E2B ISO didn't work. I tested 3 drives and 2 of the 3 worked fine. The "bad" drive boots and works on the PC. It's an old 32 Gig Corsair so don't know why VMs are choking on it.
To set up VMware 17
1. Start VMware as administrator
2. Make new blank Win10 or 11 no OS install
3.Right click machine and go to settings
4.Add HD scsi, choose physical drive # and start machine.
(Flash drive needs to be inserted to get the number)
As usual things change but this worked with a Ventoy drive I just made.
To set up Virtual Box
1.If VB is installed on C:
Open CMD as admin and type
"%programfiles%\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage" internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "C:\Disk2.vmdk" -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive2
(Change drive # to match actual drive #)
(VB will complain about createrawvmdk is deprecated but it works anyway)
2. Open VB as admin
3. Creat new Win10 virtual machine
When creating hard disk "use an existing" and grab
the Disk2.vmdk you just made on C:
