One Boot Disk To Rule Them All
HOW MANY BOOT DISKS do you have lying around your desk? Maybe you have a whole drawer stuffed with burned optical discs or USB flash drives, struggling to remember what bootable medium is on what, or you’ve tried to make do with two or three drives, swapping ISO images in and out.
Whatever your method, it’s a pain keeping tabs on them all. Optical discs are—by their nature—slow to boot and obsolete the moment a newer version of the bootable media in question is released. As flash drive capacities grow ever larger, it seems wasteful storing a single 512MB bootable rescue disk on a 16GB drive. Wouldn’t it be great if you could house all your boot disks on a single USB flash drive, then switch between them as required?
Your prayers have been answered. With Ventoy, a new open-source boot tool, you can store multiple boot images on a single flash drive, then choose which one to boot from a start-up menu. It’s simple to get up and running: Head to www.ventoy.net and click “Downloads” where you’ll find downloadable installers for Windows and Linux.
For Windows, download and extract the zip file’s contents, and double-click “Ventoy2Disk.exe.” You’ll need a single blank USB flash drive—the larger the better. It should be detected automatically (click the “Device” drop-down menu if not). By default, support for secure boot is disabled; switch it on via “Option > Secure Boot Support” if necessary, then click Install to format the drive and set things up.
Then, drag bootable installers in ISO or WIM format onto your flash drive—over 260 are officially supported, but many more should work. Reboot your PC from the USB flash drive to view a list of the copied files. Select one, and it should boot as if you’d created a standalone boot disk for it.
If secure boot is enabled on your PC, you’ll need to follow a onetime procedure outlined at www.ventoy.net/en/doc_secure.html— if successful, you’re laughing, but I was unable to get the key enrolled on my MSI X470 Gaming Plus mobo when I enabled secure boot. Disabling secure boot meant the drive worked flawlessly.
The benefit of Ventoy is obvious— in my case, I can bring together my various install media (Windows 10, Ubuntu, elementaryOS, and so on) together with a selection of rescue discs, including Macrium Reflect and Lazesoft Recovery Suite, onto a single 16GB flash drive.
When your boot media is updated, download the latest version and either replace the older version with it or run multiple versions side by side for compatibility purposes across your machines. You’re only limited by the size of your flash drive.
Ventoy itself is also undergoing rapid development—secure boot was only added in version 1.0.7, for example, while support for persistence across multiple live OSes without having to partition the flash drive arrived in version 1.0.11. The Linux install process is convoluted at the time of writing, but a GUI is already being developed by a third party so don’t be surprised to see a GUI option appear for setting up Ventoy on your Linux PCs too.
Adding these to your Ventoy flash drive is simple: Just download the latest version of the installer and use the “Update” button instead of “Install” to preserve current settings and ISO files.
As you delve deeper into Ventoy, the less user-friendly it becomes—persistence is one of several features configured using plugins (unattended installation scripts for Windows and Linux is another). These are basically JSON configuration files stored in a Ventoy subdirectory on your main partition. Thankfully, comprehensive documentation is available to explain how this all works—see https://ventoy.net/en/plugin_entry.html for details.
With Ventoy, an open-source boot tool, you can store multiple boot images on a single flash drive.