USB Boot of Multiple ISO Files by GRUB2 Boot Loader
linuxbabe.com
linuxbabe.com
Ventoy allows you to create a bootable USB containing any number of ISO files just by writing to a partition. It even supports Windows, and has some cool features like overriding Secure Boot on some machines.
No, I find ventoy more tedious, because you can't use it as a standalone on your hard drive with a sane partitioning scheme.
The only reason is because of how the ventoy detection hardcodes the partition boundaries in its checks, and it means Ventoy can only run with the partitions set in a way that may lead to alignment issues like write-amplification: I've detailed that in https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/1342
It used to be a warning - now it's a stopping error, causing the boot to hang. I don't like the boot to hang if the partition boundaries are changed.
Ideally I'd have a 10G partition after the EFI (or it could even be the EFI itself) with a few ISOs for rescue purposes + a UEFI entry to avoid having to use a bootable USB: automatically booting the ISOs in case the normal UEFI entry has a problem is less tedious that having to find and plug a thumbdrive.
I could give Ventoy its own partition wherever, but that's not possible unless I accept Ventoy hardcoded choices of partition boundaries:
(pMBR->PartTbl[0].StartSectorId != 2048 ||
pMBR->PartTbl[1].SectorCount != 65536 ||
pMBR->PartTbl[1].StartSectorId != pMBR->PartTbl[0].StartSectorId + pMBR->PartTbl[0].SectorCount)
Compared to that, I think formatting another partition to install ventoy to (in the use case you're outlining), or updating a grub config with code like `loopback loop (hd0,5)`.. for me, these take more effort and care.
Though, I'll keep the posted solution in mind if I'm ever wanting to boot from ISOs and I happen to not have a spare thumb drive around.
The other partition with the ISOs is not for when I plan to boot into a newer live ISO (which I would have to add to the partition etc): it's for when I don't plan to, or even want to!!
The last time it helped me, I had made a configuration mistake on my laptop in an airport. "grab a spare thumbdrive, and install ventoy to that" would have been very painful, but rebooting and selecting from the UEFI grub2fm to then pick an ISO from which I could fix my mistakes was very easy (or at least, easier than the alternative!)
However TBH I I hadn't had such a setup, I don't think I'd have taken the risk of doing some configuration and UKI tweaks at the airport while bored :)
You'll still have to go through basically the same excercise of the article if you want to boot another dist/iso than the ones it already recognizes.
There should be a way to automatize that, using Ventoy as a "database" of the recognized isos which could be fed to glim or anything else
When booting the Windows ISO, the boot process would never progress past the screen showing the blue windows icon on a black background.
* https://github.com/pbatard/efifs
The UEFI spec specifies (§13.3) that firmware is only required to read FAT32/16/12, which is generally why your /boot/efi is VFAT/FAT32.
* https://uefi.org/specs/UEFI/2.10/
* https://uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/UEFI_Spec_2_1...
I was joking with my boss at the time after some windoze exploit of the week that I was going to boot that into vm on the network and start dropping workstations into pxe to load linux on everything finally. I'm sure after many acquisitions and security incidents later they still use windoze in all the wrong places.
Microsoft pays billions of dollars to make itself the default on new OEM machines. As well as providing free or heavily discounted licenses to school districts to ensure the next generation only knows about Windows.
Those 1.2 billion installs are the result of aggressive (and at times legally dubious) business decisions, not 1.2 billion individual choices to install Windows.
Let's not forget the vast majority of people compute on iOS or Android now too, not Windows.
The reason Linux (sans Android) continues to be a meme in the consumer space is not because Windows has aggressive marketing behind it.
They are each doing something "right" to attain those numbers, completely different sorts of things in each case, but it's no virtue in either case, just a mechanism that works in the environment they operate in.
In both cases they are not doing something right, they are doing something effective.
At the end of the day, a typical McD's burger consists of carbs (buns), 1 to 2 meat patties, some condiment and some basic veggies. How that's garbage I fail to follow.
Food is not garbage. Elitism like what you're displaying is garbage.
Is Subway garbage too? It's again, affordable, provides all nutritious daily values and some people don't have the means to Whole Foods their diet. Ridiculous argument...
Windows is the most compatible, most widely usable and useful OS in existence. My friggin Dell laptop can't even run Ubuntu without esoteric commands. The downvoted comment below is absolutely correct. Come back down to Earth.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4FR9H7
This was given to me as a gift, I love it. Though, it's pricey enough I'm not sure I'd ever buy it for myself.
It was much cheaper, but you needed to add storage. I wish they still made them. I normally have spare disks around and it worked out much more cost effective.
[1] -https://www.zalman.com/EN/Product/ProductDetail.do?productSe...
Though they have their flaws, I've been an fan and advocate of these drives for a long time now.
I got the Zalman-VE300 because it was the cheapest HDD enclosue available to me back then. It turned out an absolute gem that pleased me through about two years and countless OS installations at an IT Support gig. When the brittle jog-dial broke and I researched the thing, it turned out to have been a Zalman rebranded IODD-2531, to extend IODD's very limited market capability (korea, china, russia). So I got the successor IODD-2541 from russia. Later, I got a IODD-mini through the failed crowdfunding campaign. SSD, screen, physical enclosure were all lousy quality. About a year ago, I bought the ST300 on iodd.shop, surprised to find that they are still going on and still have no clue of design, yet are still producing and improving new products. Will buy whatever they come up with next. Even if they still put in the same shitty screen, or still manage to put the usb port at the wrong side of the case, or still fail to rotate the screen and keypad by 90 degrees :)
While this does seem useful, it's not really "booting an ISO" if you have to manually tell it what to execute.
I do exactly what you describe with grub2-filemanager: I keep a NTFS partition on every drive, with a few ISO files: each can be >4G (unlike with a VFAT partition like the EFI partition)
In case the UEFI boot fails, grub2-filemanager is the next entry in the boot order.
Having everything inside an ISO is easier for maintenance. I often have Ubuntu LTS and the Windows install ISO: it contains a Windows PE that can be useful for rescue (chkdsk etc)
I also leave inside a few basic scripts to add grub2-filemanager to the UEFI boot at the bottom of the list (after the regular UKIs) and a few static binaries for rescues.
I'm now moving my binaries to cosmopolitan, mostly to make it easier to have their configuration file follow: cosmopolitan binaries have a /zip part where you can stuff say bashrc, which will be automatically used by the cosmopolitan bash if compiled with the right option to check /zip for config files.
When I'm done, my "rescue" NTFS partitions should only contain a handful of files (mostly ISOs and cosmopolitan binaries)
(I would also use NTFS were I in your shoes, but that's only because I like Windows and wouldn't even use GRUB as a bootloader to begin with.)
Like you, I also hate grub and prefer UKIs, but grub2filemanager is just a list to pick ISOs like in Ventoy, so I'm fine with it!
To do the job, grub only needs to show me the list of files and read the ISO file when I select it.
There's no need for a write access, so no need for ext4 - also, if I was using ext4, I couldn't see the files or add new ones from Windows
I can use the same partition as the Windows recovery partition (where .wim files are stored) - this is a dirtier trick, but a Windows recovery partition is needed to boot Windows with Bitlocker, so why not put it to a good use and keep other files?
It's a "special" partition so I can be sure Windows won't touch them and won't easily let the partition be mounted (or formatted by accident)
Overall, it's easier for me to keep this same standard partition scheme everywhere (efi=part1, msr=part2, ntfs=part3, regular OS=part4+) as it's peanuts (even with a 1G EFI and a 10G NTFS) in comparison to the comfort it provides
More seriously though, I think so. Many users would do very well by having their home dir separate from the OS and an easy way to restore the OS.
The Debian installer seems unable to pick up my LUKS/LVM/separate home partition setup it created, and this adds some friction when I want to reinstall.