Passthrough USB 3.0 controller causes "no bootable device" error

[Transient]

I have a VM running Windows Home Server 2011. It is a P2V conversion and works fine.

 

The problem I am having is when I try to pass through a USB 3.0 controller. When powering on the VM, SeaBIOS always reports "no bootable device". Pressing the CTRL+ALT+DEL button on the NoVNC toolbar soft resets the VM and then it boots normally. Everything works as expected from that point onward, including the passed through controller, up until the VM is powered down.

 

I do have a USB HDD attached to the USB 3.0 controller, so I suspect it is trying to boot to that. My VM's configuration does specify <boot order='1'/> so I'm not sure why it isn't respecting that when cold booting.

 

Has anyone else run into this problem? I've searched for hours but can't find anything that seems to be related.

[Fredrick]

Did you ever fix this issue? I seem to have the same thing..

 

The VM starts fine without the passthrough, but fails as soon as I set it to passthrough the USB-controller

 

EDIT: Changed the drive to IDE instead of VirtIO, and it works now. Unsure if that causes a performance hit tbh

Edited October 25, 2019 by Fredrick

[Transient]

Not exactly. I ended up removing the USB controller and instead I am only passing through the drive.

 

IDE definitely performs slower than VirtIO. Whether or not that is a problem will depend on your use case. I've found my Windows VMs to feel particularly slow on IDE, but almost native on VirtIO. However, with a headless Linux VM, it doesn't seem to matter as much.

[McTaurus13]

I'm not sure if this will help anyone, but I ran into this same issue today. So I started playing around with different Machine and Bios settings (specifically the Bios). I was having the issue with my VM setup with i440fx-4.2 and Seabios, But was able to successful pass through my PCIe USB controller using  i440fx-4.2 and 'OVMF'.