Table of Contents
This tip is about the how to Make Multiboot USB With Ventoy. So read this free guide, How to Make Multiboot USB With Ventoy step by step. If you have query related to same article you may contact us.
How to Make Multiboot USB With Ventoy – Guide
If you want to try a new Linux distribution, download the ISO image from the distribution website and burn it to your USB stick using the dd command or another tool like Balena Etcher. But now there’s a software tool called Ventoy that changes all that. Ventoy is an open source tool for creating usb bookable drives. It can be used to create a permanent, bookable drive that can contain more than one distribution at a time. The USB drive does not need to be formatted and you can copy as many ISO files as you like. Ventoy offers a boot menu to choose from. In addition, Ventoy supports Legacy and UEFI Secure Boot, supports ISO files larger than 4GB, and can be upgraded without reformatting the USB device.
Launch the Ventoy app. If you haven’t already, you need to connect your USB stick to your computer. If it doesn’t appear in the device box, click the Update button button. Now you know how to use the Ventoy tool to create a multiboot USB drive. It helps to use a single USB for multiple OS installations. You can now launch multiple Linux or Windows installations from a single USB drive.
Download Ventoy
Since Ventoy is an open source project, its source code is hosted on github. We can decide to compile the software from source or download the precompiled code in the form of a tarball. In that tutorial we will use the last solution. To download the latest version of the program, which at the time of writing is 1.0.14, we can launch the following command:
The tarball will be downloaded and extracted in one step; at the final, you should find a directory ventoy-1.0.14 created in your current location. From now on we will work inside it:
Prepare the USB device
Ventoy will create a multiboot USB that we can use to boot multiple distribution images, so we need to choose which USB device to use with it (to see all current block devices connected to the system, we can use the lsblk command). After deciding which USB device to use with Ventoy, we can prepare it using the Ventoy2Disk.sh script. To see the script’s “help” page and learn about its syntax, we can run it as unprivileged users, without any arguments:
As we can see, the script uses the path of a raw block device (not a partition!) as its only argument and can be executed in basically three “modes”: if we use -i as “CMD” the script to install Ventoy on the approved block device, but will fail if a previous installation already exists. To avoid this behavior and force installation no matter what we can use -I. If we use -u, an existing installation will be updated. The script also has two options: -r takes the size in MB as an argument to preserve in final of the disk; -s enables secure boot support. Because of that tutorial I go to the /dev/sdc device on my system. To work correctly, the Ventoy2Disk.sh script must be started with administrative privileges:
As soon as we give confirmation, the script will start working. Two partitions will be created on the device: the first will take up almost all available space on the device and will be formatted as exfat; the second will be used as esp and formatted as vfat.
As the main partition is formatted as exfat, in order to mount it on our distribution, packages that support this file system must be installed. In certain cases, such as the latest version of Fedora, we may need to obtain the necessary software from external repositories. In the case of Fedora, for example, rpmfusion must be added to the software sources before installing the exfat-utils and fuse-exfat) packages.
Copying the ISOs
Now that our USB device is ready, all we need to do is place the ISOs we want to use inside its first partition. On the Ventoy website you can see a list of tested ISOs (301 at the time of writing) confirmed to work properly. Images can be organized into subdirectories: Ventoy will fetch them recursively and display them in alphabetical order in the generated GRUB menu. Because of that tutorial I will use two ISOs:
Test the USB device
We install Ventoy and use it to create our multiboot device, then copy the images we want to include in our boot menu; all that’s left to do now is test that our configuration works correctly. To do this, we don’t need to restart our machine: we can test the USB device using Qemu.
To accomplish the task, we need to locate our hostbus and hostaddr from the USB device. We can do this by starting the lsusb command and looking for the appropriate device in its output. In my case, the device is the “Corsair Survivor Stealth Flash Drive”:
From the output, we can see that the device’s hostbus is 002 and the hostaddr is 007. Now that we have all the necessary information, we can launch the following command:
If everything is ok, at this moment, a new window should open where we can see the grub menu generated by Ventoy with the lines related to the images that we copied in the previous steps.
Final note
I hope you like the guide How to Make Multiboot USB With Ventoy. In case if you have any query regards this article you may ask us. Also, please share your love by sharing this article with your friends.