When everything was ready, I started my VM. You can’t redirect a USB 3.0 drive to the USB 2.0 emulated controller. Moreover, the controller options must correspond with your USB drive. You need to enable the USB controller for VM. I also attached my USB flash drive (formatted as FAT32) to my PC and later redirected it into this VM. I chose the RouterOS ISO image file and added it to this virtual CD drive. It doesn’t need any hard disk, only the CD drive on the IDE controller. I created one VM with one vCPU and 32MB RAM. You can’t boot the system with this disk and got working environment. This ISO file is bootable, but this is not a live disk. As we will use this USB on any PC, you just need to use the x86 version. That version is always the most stable.Īs I mentioned, I used the x86 (PC) 6.44.5 LTS version, but you can use any other. If you don’t need any special feature from the newer version, you can use the LTS version. You can choose between LTS, latest stable and latest beta versions. I downloaded the ISO file from the MikroTik site. Unfortunately, the Wiki page for the supported hardware is not maintained anymore and you need to try this by your own.

Many other chips are not supported and you can’t add drivers for them. RouterOS can support mostly Atheros chips. In the real world, there could be incompatibilities between RouterOS and your hardware. You can boot virtually any PC using RouterOS. You need as less as 32MB RAM and 32MB disk. The RouterOS specifications are a low demanding. I tried to use the Netinstalltool, but it failed to format this USB. The MikroTik RouterOS x86 6.44.5 LTS ISO image.The purpose of such installation could be testing, the live demo system or to use this flash drive instead of hard disk in ye olde computer. Following that fact and knowing that Linux has the live USB versions, I decided to try to install RouterOS on a USB flash drive.

Router os x86