How to create a Ventoy Bootable Flash Drive for Linux Distribution Installation and Testing

Ventoy is a solution that enables you to boot multiple Linux Distribution ISO images from one single flash drive. In this video, Jay gives you some of his thoughts on using Ventoy after finally having a chance to check it out.

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*⏰ TIME CODES*
00:00 - Intro
00:55 - The problem - multiple flash drives are hard to maintain
03:07 - Set up your own cloud-based Linux server with Linode (sponsor)
04:50 - What is Ventoy exactly?
05:41 - What do you need in order to get started with Ventoy?
06:56 - Ventoy is easy to set up on your Flash Drive
07:41 - Once set up, how do you go about using Ventoy?f
09:33 - Although it's rare, some ISO images may not be compatible with Ventoy
10:00 - How Do You Update Ventoy?
10:56 - Ventoy's incompatibility with some file types

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#Linux #Ventoy #LinuxDistro

[nathanielmoore]

I love Ventoy. I used to have too few flash drives and would find myself imaging the same drive with image A only to overwrite with image B, and then sometime later overwrite again with image A. Now I keep an external SSD with all my favorite distros and bootable tools like Clonezilla. I even have a Windows ISO on it. It's got everything I need, and I don't have to worry much about overwriting it or running out of space.

[HaroldCrews]

I use my Ventoy USB every week when I do backups of my OS drive using Clonezilla. There are also several ISO images of the few distros I play around with and several diagnostic tools or system recovery tools as well. Lastly if you're like me and do tech support for friends and family then you're going to also have some Windows tools and malware scanning ISOs too.

[kote]

I absolutely love ventoy. I recommend it to all my friends. Usually they say "I already know how to create a multiboot flash drive." And then they try it and say "thank you, that's awesome!"

[cbidmead]

But why skip the key feature of Ventoy -- the ability to add persistence?

[johncrunk]

I have been using Ventoy for several years. It's the easiest way to keep all the ISOs in one place and makes installation simple. Also eliminates the need for a USB copy program like dd.

[praecorloth]

Under the category of "Do you even remember..." I would like to submit the Iomega SuperDisk. SuperDisks were around when the Zip Drive was the cool thing to have. They supported 120MB of storage, and were the same form factor as the 3.5" floppy. A lot of computers shipped with them, but almost no one ever knew that they had a SuperDisk drive.

[haspok]

I love Ventoy too. I dedicated one of my internal hard drives to ventoy and reserved some space at the back of that HD. Then I created a standard ESP partition right behind the Ventoy efi partition. So the ISOs go on to the first partition, 2nd partition is the Ventoy EFi, 3rd is a standard ESP, On the remaining part of the HDD I can do whatever I want. Create more partitions and install multiboot systems using the ISOs from the first partition as an installation media. It's up to me where I boot from. Either from Ventoy or one of my installed systems. Multiple linux and or windows. This hdd became a very flexible test playground. I don"t even use flash drives unless I need something portable.
I did the same thing with an external USB HDD too. Ventoy ISO's. Ventoy EFI, standard ESP, then multiple running system and simple storage partitions. And it's portable.

[aromaticsnail]

Is there any trustworthy entity that can vouch that this app is safe? I couldn't even find the source code. Is it closed-sourced? If so, should we be installing OSes on our devices with this, blindly?

[bc]

So where is the how to part of the video? This is a why you might want to use it video.

[paulstaf]

Regardless of your use case, Ventoy is awesome even if you only use it to load an OS once in while... much quicker and easier to just copy an ISO to the stick than to try and correctly create a live USB stick bootable install.

[thekenpoole]

the title says how to create a Ventoy bootable flash drive but never got to that point. talked about every other thing about Ventoy but after watching it I'm no nearer to creating a bootable ventoy flash drive.

[cybersecurity]

Hi, the ISO file does not keep the installed extensions or something else, after rebooting it again everything is gone. Is there any sulution for that?

[Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Sad to say I have seen the hole evolution from tape drive storage to today storage media as well. Lol
Never got into the Jazdrive but I did use zipdisk. Then there was the CD's, DVD's and now Usb disks. I remember reading something years ago that Usb will never be a thing and floppy disks will be around forever. Well that was wrong... Lol
I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard when you pulled out that basket of usb drives Jay... 🤣
Then you pulled out my label maker maker as well, feels like you were using my office as props for your video... 😄🤣

I started using Ventoy as well it is a awesome utility tool to be sure.
Thanks for the video Jay.

LLAP 🖖

P.S. I have lots more junk for props... 🤪

[milos]

Couple of hours ago I downloaded my 15th distro to try out with Ventoy :) PopOS is great, but does not wake after deep sleep and I need to find another favorite. Too bad, because the tiling options is great especially when working with multiple monitors. Great video as always.

[knightone]

I guess I am a dummy, how do you run the tool in linux?

[ArniesTech]

One Drive to rule them all 🙏💍🧝🏻‍♀️🧙🏼‍♂️

[jpwillm]

Ventoy will mark computing as knoppix did with the first live CD !
Ventoy marquera l'informatique comme l'a fait knoppix avec le premier CD live !

[TogonzoMedia]

A few things you didn't mention: Ventoy has separate x86 and x64 executables in the download but it's supposed to detect your system and launch the proper executable. It often doesn't do this as evidenced by your video as it launched the 32-bit x86 version on a 64-bit Windows install. If Windows is booting from an MBR/CSM configured system, this could explain the auto detect problem. Also, Ventoy itself shows if it's booting in either BIOS/CSM Mode or UEFI Mode in the lower left corner of its GUI so people have to keep that in mind, especially when trying to install Windows 11 - it doesn't support CSM Mode so users gotta make sure thier Ventoy stick was created from the x64 executable from a Windows system in UEFI Mode with Secure Boot enabled to ensure the Windows 11 installer behaves. Ventoy also supports Secure Boot and it's MOK manager can be enrolled so that it'll boot in UEFI Mode with Secure Boot enabled. This is perfect for systems that already have Secure Boot, Resizable BAR, and fTPM all enabled in their UEFI so their Windows 11 installs go smoothly as well as Fedora and OpenSuse as they support Secure Boot, too. Lastly, when installing Linux from Ventoy, the Calamares installer will often add the Ventoy stick into the update sources as a repo. This will cause errors when downloading Linux updates because the Ventoy stick is most likely removed (and offline 😝) at this point, but it's a simple enough fix just to remove it from the update sources.

[jbonn]

Me: "Hey Jay, what distro should I keep with me on a USB drive?"

Jay: "All of them!"

HAHA! Great video, Jay! Keep them coming!

[败蹬牌機車辅慈母守中]

this episode is awesome. still I insist you should mention the "vDisk boot Plugin" and "Vhdboot plugin" maybe next time. that's the gem of ventoy !!!