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FullScale4Me wrote:Ventoy – How-To

Ventoy allows booting from one or more ISOs without having to burn them to a USB. USB drive is used throughout this How-To guide and is equivalent to: flash drive, pen drive, jump drive USB stick & jump stick.

1 Introduction
Ventoy is a program that is installed on a USB drive, NOT on the PC system. This USB drive (stick) then can boot from any of the ISOs on the USB. This is a one time per USB installation of Ventoy. Ventoy eliminates having to burn each ISO to a separate USB.

Ventoy automatically adds ISOs of your choice to its boot menu so that you can decide which one to use for bootup. Moreover, the USB drive is not dedicated to Ventoy, you can add documents and other files without affecting the Ventoy program operation.

5 pages, 191 kb PDF

https://fullscale4me.com/Ventoy-How-To.pdf

NOTE: there are 3 major tasks in preparing a Ventoy USB drive prior to use:

• Running the downloaded Ventoy USB preparation installation program (section 2).
• Copying the ISOs to the Ventoy partition on the USB (section 6).
• Booting from the USB – the Ventoy ISO installer starts automatically (section 7).

There's been some confusion on the internet – mostly the blurring together of the 1st & 3rd above tasks.

Comments and suggestions are requested as the resulting improvements could help some future newbies. Even for people who have never used Ventoy as clarity is the goal after seeing what Google searches produce.

Edit: 10 spell-fix. 2) added 3 major tasks...

Minor nits:
As well as working with downloaded .iso files, Ventoy works as a quick-&-dirty way of saving an loading MX snapshot iso files
(I try to create one before doing anything that might be drastic) this might deserve a mention.

I also use Ventoy on a USB stick to save and boot snapshots of a Ubuntu Fossa system (I use PinguyBuilder, which limits the iso size to 4GB, so that I have to use persistent.dat files to save the overflow.) Persistence in Ventoy is briefly explained in the Ventoy README, which comes with the installation, or e.g. https://ostechnix.com/create-persistent ... -in-linux/ with more detail.
Persistence also helps to save state on a live system.

All in all, yours is a great introduction to a useful utility.
Thanks,
Mike

Yet, one more option, instead of using persistence I use a fully installed MX on a virtual drive, Ventoy can be used to boot virual drive images: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html

Thank you both for the feedback!

I have created a section at the end called 'Additional resources' with the info supplied.

MikeR wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 3:23 am EDIT: Just noticed - www.ventoy.net appears to be unreachable.

The web site loads for me. West Coast, USA.

Nice job. Couple of minor items:

--you state at the beginning that you will use "USB Drive" in place of all the other terms. Then there is a "USB Drive (stick)" at the beginning of Section 1, and there is still a "USB Stick" near the bottom of the first page. You go on to use simply "USB" instead of "USB Drive" in the rest of the document.
--you tell the user to put the drive into a USB3 outlet; but older machines will not have that. How about: "...USB3 outlet (blue tab in the center), if available, otherwise the USB2 outlet" or something like that?
--top of p. 2: you start using simply "USB" instead of what you declared.
--bottom of p. 2: "Extracct"

Nice concise manual, ventoy is great ! I noticed a couple inconsistencies in the text between releases mentioned in the text vs the screenshots (1.0.96/1.0.97).

@adrian , that is intriguing, how would one go about "fully installing ' to a virtual drive then booting that from ventoy ? Perhaps creating said virtual drive from something like virtualbox (which i have not used in years), then installing to that and copy the resulting "image" to the ventoy usb key ?

Also something that is unclear to me: can one use MX's persistence when booting off ventoy, or should one use the ventoy persistence mechanism instead ? What are the advantages of one vs the other ?

Anyway thanks for bringing ventoy to the attention of more users. It has made it so easy to try and test most any ISO out there (without overwriting a USB key/drive). And from my limited testing it seems to work just as well as rufus for installing windows (10 & 11 with a local account).

baldyeti wrote: ↑Sun Feb 09, 2025 4:55 pm @adrian , that is intriguing, how would one go about "fully installing ' to a virtual drive then booting that from ventoy ? Perhaps creating said virtual drive from something like virtualbox (which i have not used in years), then installing to that and copy the resulting "image" to the ventoy usb key ?

Pretty much like that, the how to is in the link I posted (I think the only difference is that you don't have to run that vtoyboot.sh anymore, so yeah you create a virtual harddrive in VirtualBox (just make sure it's fully allocated -- by default VBox creates a sparse file that grows when needed, you need a fully allocated one) then boot MX in VBox, install it on the virtual drive, make whatever changes you want, shut down VBox and copy the virtual harddrive to Ventoy (add a .vtoy extension to the file). That's pretty much it, now you can use Ventoy to boot that .vtoy file instead of a .iso and whatever changes you make are preserved because that's an installed MX not a live environment -- that obviously has pluses and minuses compared to a live environment, but I think it can be pretty useful -- just make sure the virtual box is large enough for whatever you need.

... I used before python3-multibootusb (very small app.) ... but now I use Ventoy too ... much easier nowdays.

Thank you all for that feedback. The new version uploaded.

I will create an 'Advanced Use' section soon to cover what's been discussed.

This all started when I received a comment about the Ventoy section of my MX Linux Quick-start Guide (excerpt below)

Ventoy

• Download the installation package ventoy-x.x.xx-windows.zip and decompress it.
• Run Ventoy2Disk.exe and select the device and click Install or Update button.
• Copy ISO to Ventoy drive on USB.
• Boot from USB and select MX Linux. Press enter.

The commenter needed more....