A New Bootable USB Solution | Hacker News Reader

A New Bootable USB Solution

ventoy.net

182 pointsUncle_Sam47 comments

Love this. Saves me having several USB drives with different Operating Systems on them. And now you can buy relatively cheap flash drives that go up to 512GB & can stuff loads of ISOs onto it and boot into them with Ventoy.

I bought a few thumb drives for this and they arrived the same day I discovered Ventoy. Definitely experienced mixed emotions on that one.

They have a list at https://www.ventoy.net/en/distrowatch.html of some supported operating systems.

It supports most Linux distros and it also supports FreeBSD.

Some operating systems that it failed to work with according to that page include, among others: ReactOS, SmartOS, Haiku and OpenBSD.

They have another list as well of tested operating systems here: https://ventoy.net/en/isolist.html

According to that page it supports many versions of Windows too, as well as VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Xen XCP-ng.

So probably a good idea to check those two lists first before choosing which operating systems you want to use with it, if you are looking to get something that works with the least amount of effort.

And if you have time to spare then try some that are currently marked as not working, or which have not been tested, and figure out how to get those working too and contribute that info to the Ventoy maintainer via their GitHub :)

Huh, fail with OpenBSD? I have successfully installed OpenBSD 6.9 i386 on my dad's laptop using Ventoy on MBR

I spent a while making the perfect portable Linux USB SSD with persistent storage and a universally mountable data partition using ventoy - then discovered that my Surface Laptop 3 can't boot upstream Linux and gave up on the whole endeavor.

I have my home network configured with netboot.xyz, which provides a similar experience except without using USB at all.

you can also boot netboot.xyz.iso from ventoy without configuring the network :)

This is a bit off topic, but I'd love to hear more detail as to your home network setup. I've seen netboot.xyz before but I have no real knowledge as to how such a setup would work.

What I did was get up a server as DHCP server on the LAN, install tftpd on it and have netboot.xyz on it. Then for other machines (inside same LAN) that you want to boot something or install a distro, you would boot LAN, the dhcp server you set up will automatically let that other machine boot into netboot.xyz and then you can choose your distro.

It works really well for colocation server where you don't have the freedom to go there and plug in an Usb or a DVD because it's 1000km away in the footsteps of a hotspring in Iceland for example.

Linux Server did a nice blog post about netbootxyz (specifically about their docker container, but it's a good read nonetheless)

https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docke...

You can also use Pixiecore to boot it without a DHCP and pxe servers.

I have a Synology NAS running a TFTP server with the netboot.xyz payload, and I configured the DHCP server on my UDM Pro (https://store.ui.com/products/udm-pro) to announce the NAS's IP address as the netboot server.

This website is missing an "installation" section or a "how the fuck do I start using this". Dear developers, even if your software is easy to install and use, don't assume that everyone knows which method you've chosen to install and use your software. There are a million ways to do things, and I can't read your mind.

Not saying is super easy to find.

But it's literally the second page in documentation https://ventoy.net/en/doc_start.html

Fair enough, it's hidden under a navigation link called "Document", which isn't exactly clear.

I screwed around with Ventoy for a while but couldn't get it to work for my use case. This was along with a slew of other USB booting solutions including (but not limited to) unetbootin, rufus, Sardu, lili, and yumi.

We have an obscure imaging program we licensed for our Windows fleet, and I wanted to do it along with a normal Windows 10 boot on one USB connected ssd. Finally got it working after days of research with just manually creating the partitions and putting them in the right order.

I'd lay out the part table, but I'm not at work...

*edit: I feel I should mention the imaging program is Windows based, maybe Windows PE (is that still a thing?). It does the spinning Windows 10 wait animation until booted.

I remember the day I've found Sardu, it was mind blowing, but they have this ridiculous thing about naming the ISOs and copying is really slow, now with Ventoy it's just work TM. We've come a long way.

> Windows PE (is that still a thing?).

Seems to be. Latest release was 3 months ago, “Built from Windows 11 v21H2 code base.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Envi...

PE exists as a 'lightweight' Windows environment and is basically what you are using as you install Windows from DVD/USB/ISO.

Under the bonnet there are also command line tools included in Windows such as DISM and WinImage and good old DiskPart that can be used to edit and dump a copy of the Windows OS (as a .wim file) onto a SSD/HDD and then boot it and let it auto-configure to the hardware.

This is actually nice, I can put ISOs from any Type-C device onto this drive without worrying about needing access to another working PC in order create a bootable drive to format my own systems.

"Which style should I select? MBR or UEFI?

Anyway, the best for you is the best"

https://ventoy.net/en/doc_mbr_vs_gpt.html

Poor translation, but the meaning is obvious:

Either way. Use whichever works best for your target hardware.

That's why I like the answer. It's the user's choice.

Yeah, me too :)

I wish there was an easy way to install it on macos.

I am not sure if this is what you are asking, but you can create a bootable USB with ventoy on macos using Virtualbox.

Create a VM with no storage, boot from the ventoy ISO, pass through the USB port from the host machine. I used this a couple of days back to create a bootable ventoy drive from my Macbook Pro.

Ah yes, exactly what I need. I tried to create something similar in the past with some grub magic, but this seems easier to maintain :D

I find Ventoy really good! Saves juggling many USB drives and it worked fine with the ISOs I tested including Windows 10, Macrium Reflect’s recovery disc, and Ubuntu. I was pretty close to buying a hardware solution (iodd) but for simple needs, Ventoy seems solid.

Any attempt to support secure boots ? or can it be signed by valid key ?

BTW there is a patch to review from me at:

https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/pulls?q=author%3Arzr

What I really miss is the read only nature of CD, DVD based boots.

It is so easy to make the perfect USB only to ruin it by sticking in a "dirty" machine.

The write protect switches on a few select USB flash drives are more of a suggestion than a hard detterent.

So many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?

I've had the opposite experience, every single one works great first try but with most operating systems releasing at least twice per year these days. As such I haven't found the need to have a big list of options that I'll install more than once or twice anyways. That combined with UEFI there isn't much process to make USBs bootable.

Persistence always seemed cool on these types of tools but similarly I've never needed a persistent USB I'll boot from often enough to make the persistence more of a benefit than a burden.

What are the others that you have tried?

Latest one was Universal USB Installer [1].

[1] https://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-a...

It depends upon the OS.

I find that it is reliable for Linux and Windows. It is easy to copy an ISO onto a flash drive, it can store multiple ISOs, and those ISOs can be updated without overwriting other data on the drive. This means application installers and data backups can be stored on the same drive, making it a very convenient recovery drive.

As for other operating systems, they seem to boot partially but the boot process ultimately fails when they try to access the drive directly.

I haven't been able to make Gandalf's WinPE image boot using Ventoy.

How about "Hirem's BootCD" WinPE image.

I've used it with Hirens with no issues other than ensuring UEFI is enabled on the computer I'm booting it on.

Getting a malware warning from virustotal.com on the download.

Using with with easy2boot is better.

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