MX Linux Forum

Ventoy – How-To PDF, 433Kb, illustrated, updated: October 3, 2025.

Excerpt below.

Ventoy allows booting from one or more ISOs without having to burn them to a USB. The Ventoy program is installed on a USB drive, NOT on the PC system. This USB drive then can boot from any of the ISOs on the USB drive. This is a one time per USB installation of Ventoy. Ventoy eliminates having to burn each ISO to a separate USB drive.

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.

1 Important notes

After downloading, there are 3 major tasks in preparing a Ventoy USB drive prior to use:

• Running the downloaded Ventoy USB preparation installation program.

• Copying the ISOs to the Ventoy partition on the USB.

• Booting from the USB – the Ventoy ISO installer starts automatically.

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

More at link above ^.

Edit: formatting touch up & excerpt update.

Great addition, thanks.

Very nicely done. Couple of comments:

--Suggest a clearer organization (b/c I lost the argument flow when I read it the first couple of times, so items like downloading to Desktop then moving to Downloads -- do they need to be kept at all after being loaded on Ventoy? -- made no sense to me)

3, Ventoy instillation
3.1 Linux
3.2 Windows

--Is downloading to the Desktop folder required by Ventoy? If not the extra step of moving them to Downloads can be eliminated. And anyway, do they have to stay at all after loaded on to Ventoy?I guess this is under Windows

--Correct the header levels 7-9 so they show in the outline

Jerry3904 wrote: Sun Oct 05, 2025 12:56 pm

Being an MX-centric person I think it would be less confusing to complete the MX instructions and add a section for other distros at the end.

I feel pretty much the same, Mike, and I made a similar comment on your Ventoy how-to. Really would like to see a quick restructuring of both for the sake of clarity when you have a chance.

I'm not clear at all on your [Jerry: all these you=me?] point(s) about Ventoy. Outline? My response to you is: grab a USB, download Ventoy, use my PDF as a run through process doc and then circle back.

Not everyone has multiple Linux PCs so a Windows install section IMHO is required. Not having a Windows option will make a user try other apps, some are much more prone to failure (they dd copy the ISO to a MBR). Ventoy is one of the VERY VERY few USB boot from ISO apps that gives the end user a choice of MBR or GPT disk partitioning.

I am shrinking it a bit: dropped updating and persistence, as most will never use those. Moved a sentence from section 2 into the lead section and more white-space there too. Now 4 pages from 6.

Or you could use the verbal salad here - https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_start.html that is, if you can see it above the big shrouding of one advert. Reactions to that linked Ventoy page here and elsewhere is what inspired me to make mine. I'm not the first so there is a precedence (it's stickied too).

Thanks for that.