How to create a Ventoy Bootable Flash Drive for Linux Distribution Installation and Testing

Ventoy is a solution that enables you to boot multiple Linux Distribution ISO images from one single flash drive. In this video, Jay gives you some of his thoughts on using Ventoy after finally having a chance to check it out.
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⏰ TIME CODES
00:00 - Intro
00:55 - The problem - multiple flash drives are hard to maintain
03:07 - Set up your own cloud-based Linux server with Linode (sponsor)
04:50 - What is Ventoy exactly?
05:41 - What do you need in order to get started with Ventoy?
06:56 - Ventoy is easy to set up on your Flash Drive
07:41 - Once set up, how do you go about using Ventoy?f
09:33 - Although it's rare, some ISO images may not be compatible with Ventoy
10:00 - How Do You Update Ventoy?
10:56 - Ventoy's incompatibility with some file types
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#Linux #Ventoy #LinuxDistro

[@nathanielmoore87]

I love Ventoy. I used to have too few flash drives and would find myself imaging the same drive with image A only to overwrite with image B, and then sometime later overwrite again with image A. Now I keep an external SSD with all my favorite distros and bootable tools like Clonezilla. I even have a Windows ISO on it. It's got everything I need, and I don't have to worry much about overwriting it or running out of space.

[@HaroldCrews]

I use my Ventoy USB every week when I do backups of my OS drive using Clonezilla. There are also several ISO images of the few distros I play around with and several diagnostic tools or system recovery tools as well. Lastly if you're like me and do tech support for friends and family then you're going to also have some Windows tools and malware scanning ISOs too.

[@als1023]

My thoughts, when I watched the video, thanks for posting ! I've never heard of it, got it downloaded and running on a new 128GB Scandisk. I may use this to replace my virtual linux installs. It will certainly contain tools as you mention. I've saved tools for decades, have many and never had a single repository.

[@gh2r32vgrf]

Bonjour , perhaps you have to try Rescuezilla which has a better GUI than Clonezilla 😂… I use it to clone my Pop OS,Zorin Os and W11 PC .. I clone also with Macrium . In case of difficulties with the graphic driver try the fallback graphic mode..

[@als1023]

@@gh2r32vgrf I use Macrium as well, it is terrific at data / drive management, certainly worth paying for in my view.

[@johncrunk8038]

I have been using Ventoy for several years. It's the easiest way to keep all the ISOs in one place and makes installation simple. Also eliminates the need for a USB copy program like dd.

[@kote315]

I absolutely love ventoy. I recommend it to all my friends. Usually they say "I already know how to create a multiboot flash drive." And then they try it and say "thank you, that's awesome!"

[@has53pok]

I love Ventoy too. I dedicated one of my internal hard drives to ventoy and reserved some space at the back of that HD. Then I created a standard ESP partition right behind the Ventoy efi partition. So the ISOs go on to the first partition, 2nd partition is the Ventoy EFi, 3rd is a standard ESP, On the remaining part of the HDD I can do whatever I want. Create more partitions and install multiboot systems using the ISOs from the first partition as an installation media. It's up to me where I boot from. Either from Ventoy or one of my installed systems. Multiple linux and or windows. This hdd became a very flexible test playground. I don"t even use flash drives unless I need something portable. I did the same thing with an external USB HDD too. Ventoy ISO's. Ventoy EFI, standard ESP, then multiple running system and simple storage partitions. And it's portable.

[@bhoolondon291]

I like the idea. I have SSD with 1TB. Can you share the steps, pls? I am a newbie. Btw, just using Orange Pi 4 and already Armbian Linux installed on it. Is there any way I can use it without overwriting it?😊

[@praecorloth]

Under the category of "Do you even remember..." I would like to submit the Iomega SuperDisk. SuperDisks were around when the Zip Drive was the cool thing to have. They supported 120MB of storage, and were the same form factor as the 3.5" floppy. A lot of computers shipped with them, but almost no one ever knew that they had a SuperDisk drive.

[@enermaxstephens1051]

Thank you for making this! Just started using Ventoy today.

[@adminema6116]

ventoy is plain awesome! i like the new musical curtains of lltv! greetings from buenos aires!

[@edwardvanhazendonk]

Thanks for sharing Jay, Ventoy is great and I use it for my distro's and as a toolkit.

[@LinXnerd]

That's an awesome tool to learn about. I had no idea that this existed, although I thought about developing it myself. I knew that it could be done. Now I can make a flash drive with this software and study its contents. Nice... 🙂

[@Weirlive]

love me some Ventoy!!!! Great video

[@matthoover1026]

Thank you for the detailed instruction. I was interested in this, but had no idea how to go about setting it up. I love Linux, but I'm every bit the novice as I'm not in a " need to use my computer everyday" sort of lifestyle. Even when I do pick up a few things, I quickly forget because it may be months (if ever) before I need to repeat a process outside of very basic use.

[@ChristophHoward]

You download the utility onto a computer and then use it to setup the usb drive. Then you copy over all iso files you want to be on it.

[@eleah2665]

I did not know about Ventoy. Cool. Thanks.

[@LearnLinuxTV]

You're welcome!

[@milos018]

Couple of hours ago I downloaded my 15th distro to try out with Ventoy :) PopOS is great, but does not wake after deep sleep and I need to find another favorite. Too bad, because the tiling options is great especially when working with multiple monitors. Great video as always.

[@sumirandahal76]

I am also getting the deep sleep issue from like 2 months, searching for a new one to switch.

[@user-ob4lb9sz3x]

this episode is awesome. still I insist you should mention the "vDisk boot Plugin" and "Vhdboot plugin" maybe next time. that's the gem of ventoy !!!

[@Thomas_Grusz]

Great tool. Thanks for sharing!

[@flukywotsit8555]

Worrying know and used all the hardware types but never heard of ventoy but know what I will be downloading at work tomorrow. Thanks for the great suggestion

[@a_maxed_out_handle_of_30_chars]

thank you jay, very cool :)

[@busterj11776]

Thanks for the hard work, great video, BTW I still have a working IOMEGA Jazz unit but have to use a virtual computer to get it to work properly

[@TogonzoMedia]

A few things you didn't mention: Ventoy has separate x86 and x64 executables in the download but it's supposed to detect your system and launch the proper executable. It often doesn't do this as evidenced by your video as it launched the 32-bit x86 version on a 64-bit Windows install. If Windows is booting from an MBR/CSM configured system, this could explain the auto detect problem. Also, Ventoy itself shows if it's booting in either BIOS/CSM Mode or UEFI Mode in the lower left corner of its GUI so people have to keep that in mind, especially when trying to install Windows 11 - it doesn't support CSM Mode so users gotta make sure thier Ventoy stick was created from the x64 executable from a Windows system in UEFI Mode with Secure Boot enabled to ensure the Windows 11 installer behaves. Ventoy also supports Secure Boot and it's MOK manager can be enrolled so that it'll boot in UEFI Mode with Secure Boot enabled. This is perfect for systems that already have Secure Boot, Resizable BAR, and fTPM all enabled in their UEFI so their Windows 11 installs go smoothly as well as Fedora and OpenSuse as they support Secure Boot, too. Lastly, when installing Linux from Ventoy, the Calamares installer will often add the Ventoy stick into the update sources as a repo. This will cause errors when downloading Linux updates because the Ventoy stick is most likely removed (and offline 😝) at this point, but it's a simple enough fix just to remove it from the update sources.

[@paulstaf]

Regardless of your use case, Ventoy is awesome even if you only use it to load an OS once in while... much quicker and easier to just copy an ISO to the stick than to try and correctly create a live USB stick bootable install.

[@paulwarner5395]

Thanx for the video. I use an external USB3 SSD harddisk. Works well.

[@ailithic5448]

Literally just what I was thinking about

[@mathieuberthalay21]

Thank you for your video and for this tools

[@SeanAnthony]

Jay, did you have to download each Distro individually from Distrowatch?

[@Gothmog4]

Thanks a lot for this! :-)

[@joeyhensley9199]

Does Ventoy have a type of persistence for the .iso files? Meaning if I run the Ubuntu .iso, then run update/full-upgrade, will those changes remain? Or will they be lost after removing the USB?

[@gabrielshansen]

Jazz SCSI drive for my Amiga 2000 and 3000 was AWESOME!

[@Jeff_Seely]

Oh yeah. I have used jazz disk drives before and I thought it was the final say in "large capacity portable media"🤣. Actually, I have used just about every kind of floppy ever commercially available. Floppies that resembled an LP vinyl album sleeve. Commodore/amiga tapes, reel tapes and a lot of others and with each I thought the industry had hit the ceiling on capacity. Funny how things turn out...Great video!!

[@BrewMiester]

Awesome, I have been using YUMI. The problem with it is that you have to run the program to add new images to the flash drive. I will definitely be switching to Ventoy.

[@rawa9891]

Hi Jay, I did have to chuckle a little when you said "My career" and you show the Commodore 64 cassette 🙂... I started the same way, WAY BACK in the day and love doing computer projects where others say "it can't be done" 🤣. Now as we move on with our experimental systems and home labs, questions do arise. I am an avid watcher of your learn Linux classes and other topics that you bring out. Even an old Network, computer, and programming engineer like me can learn something new as I did in your courses ("Great job + 5 stars earned"). After setting up two Truenas Core systems on "Normal" MSI mainboards, the question came up about creating system SSD images of the Truenas system disk (SSD) so as to be prepared in case of an emergency. That's where Ventoy came in, which worked like a charm using clonezilla-live-lunar-amd64. Using a Seagate external 2 Tb USB PS4 game drive as the ext4 destination and naturally your pointers, the Image for the Truenas system was created with absolutely no errors and later copied to a secure external fileserver. Actually I'm somewhat surprised at how easy it was to create the Image of the Truenas system. A 5 star review for Learn Linux TV. Keep up the good work!

[@Theborg72]

thanks, will save a lot of time when you are constantly deleting and creating new installation usb. Now you save a lot of time just plug in and use. So fun to be able to watch your video and learn new things that make everyday life easier.

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Sad to say I have seen the hole evolution from tape drive storage to today storage media as well. Lol Never got into the Jazdrive but I did use zipdisk. Then there was the CD's, DVD's and now Usb disks. I remember reading something years ago that Usb will never be a thing and floppy disks will be around forever. Well that was wrong... Lol I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard when you pulled out that basket of usb drives Jay... 🤣 Then you pulled out my label maker maker as well, feels like you were using my office as props for your video... 😄🤣 I started using Ventoy as well it is a awesome utility tool to be sure. Thanks for the video Jay. LLAP 🖖 P.S. I have lots more junk for props... 🤪

[@Tjensen999]

My brother used to work at iOmega, and I remember him bringing home ZIP drives and JAZ drives for us to mess with. Wow, how time has flown.

[@Khal3dMustafa]

Ventoy was a lifesaver for me, I used to format my flash drive every time I wanted a new OS.

[@dawnmitchell8213]

Ventoy is so awesome!

[@felippehdlinux]

Ventoy is amazing!

[@cbidmead]

But why skip the key feature of Ventoy -- the ability to add persistence?

[@msor6108]

Elaborate

[@cbidmead]

@@msor6108 I'm not clear whether this enigmatic response means "you call persistence a 'key feature' but I regard it as purely decorative" or is it an injunction to "tell me more about persistence because I can't be bothered to visit the Ventoy site to find out".

[@Oppy-qf8dv]

Non persistent cannot be traced back to you once you turn the machine off... i.e. using Kali to do some, uh., research only stuff... or perhaps visiting dark web sites. For both of these case scenarios, persistence would endanger you or your equipment.

[@pivot3india]

Very useful tool indeed.

[@user-dz3ph7dl4m]

Used Ventoy recently to try out a few distros on a multi-boot system (bare metal). Handy having multiple isos in once place

[@CGA111]

I've been using Ventoy for over a year now and it's become absolutely indispensable to me.

[@cybersecurity324]

Hi, the ISO file does not keep the installed extensions or something else, after rebooting it again everything is gone. Is there any sulution for that?

[@jbonn5365]

Me: "Hey Jay, what distro should I keep with me on a USB drive?" Jay: "All of them!" HAHA! Great video, Jay! Keep them coming!

[@jasonluong3862]

Does the Ventoy USB thumbdrive contain the ISOs of all the OSes on its option list? Can I use rEFInd to dual boot Windows 11 with ChromeFlex? If so, how do I put the ChromeFlex ISO onto the Ventoy flash drive?

[@pivot3india]

Can we also add iso images for xcp-ng and proxmox ?

[@gergemall]

Thank you ❤

[@rdmon746]

Loved the Jaz drive, used it every day as portable source code (sneaker net) before git. Was pretty quick ala SCSI.

[@hobbsy]

how much space does every DistroWatch iso take up on your drive?

[@T313COmun1s7]

Yes, I remember the Jazz Drive. I never used it because I prefered the LS120 SuperDisk. Do you remember those? The size of a standard 3.5" floppy and 120MB in a super fast disk. I put them in all of my computers and in the PCs of many other people where I worked as the IT Director. They basically replaced floppies for us. Also, Tom was wrong when he said "best." I think Ventory might be able to garner easiest, but best has to go to Easy2Boot.

[@thechronic723]

Ventoy is just wow , this was something I always wanted t make my work flow fluent

[@AliensInc.]

Yep, same here. I even think that I've seen older stuff than you do, like punch cards 😋 I've tried Ventoy 6 or 7 times that last 1 year or so and I always have problems with booting into Vanilla Arch UEFI, BIOS is OK, but not UEFI, donno why. Last time was about 5 months ago. Good that it works for you though.

[@oscs4556]

Be good to have a video about the ventoy plug-ins too

[@BobDoe_69]

ventoy is a must, kind of surprised you are only covering it now tbh

[@simondj8572]

I highly appreciate your time and work for all of your video tutorials. So, May I ask you why you chose MBR type partition over the GPT type? Thanks

[@LearnLinuxTV]

The flash drive isn't large enough for that to matter.

[@TheTimeProphet]

I didn't know you could update it. gonna do that now.

[@mohsenmousavi9980]

Can we copy linux , windows and other kind of iso like proxmox all in a single flash memory?

[@wyfyj]

Love Ventoy

[@MahfuzurRahman-xl9pj]

Does ventoy work with secure boot? Do I have to configure the secure boot to make ventoy work?

[@DG-ks5wn]

Can ventoy also be used for external ssds or ssds in USB cases? Or does it only Support USB drives?😅

[@NeoBTK]

The tool I've been missing :)

[@futz48]

-I love Ventoy, and I use it a lot, but some (Arch based) distros will not boot from it. Two come to mind right away - Archcraft, and Arcolinux. -The fact that Arcolinux won't start is annoying to me because it's my favorite. I collect Thinkpads and ThinkCentres and almost always put Arcolinux on them all, at least at first, because I'm super comfortable using it and I can get a feel right away on how the machine performs. -I'm sure someone knows a fix. Please tell me! For now I keep a separate Arco stick at the ready.

[@galloe]

I have a question, since I'm a bit confused. Idk if I'm not paying attention, or if it's not clear in the video, but are you running the distros straight from the USB drive as in live boot? Or are you running the installer and went through the full installation process but didn't show it in the video? From the video it looks like you're running it live without having to install any distros. Also, what do you mean by saying that not every single distribution image is bootable?

[@QuimChaos]

what test, diagnose, bench and rescue ISOs you guys use?

[@xerr0n]

erm.... hirens bootcd or other based on it

[@HaroldCrews]

I have Avira Rescue System, Clonzilla, Eset System Rescue, Hiren Boot CD, Kaspersky Rescue, memtest86 (also Clonezilla includes it), Network SEcurity Toolkit, ShredOS, and Super Grub2 Disk.

[@QuimChaos]

@@HaroldCrews thanks!

[@mrpaasha]

I have installed fedora in my laptop. And when i turn the screen in locked for a while or suspended. After all that happen when i turn on the screen, unfortunately turns black with no cursor. And i have to forcely shutdown and boot again. Does this method fix my problem? Anyone?

[@MartesWigglesworth]

@LearnLinuxTV there is no Mac OS version available. There are only three versions available: livecd, windows, and linux tar file.

[@thefarah]

did you run a command to download every distro or did you manually click to download.

[@DouglasJenkins]

I started with the Radio Shack Color Computer. Its tape drive actually read programs faster than the original Commodore disk drive! However, one had to keep track of the place on the tape where a specific program was! If you didn't zero out your tape counter, and start the tape from the beginning ... well, a lot of wasted time searching! So there's that!

[@mdavid1955]

Not only do I remember Iomega Jazz drives..I've used them as a bootable OS for early Macs..for diagnostic uses.

[@noahriding5780]

With Windows OSes they are already making it so you have to jump to the next new OS like every what 2 years now? Something like that. Already the next one will end in 2024. Are the Linux OSes going to be around long term? Like if I put Mint or something on my computer, will I be able to stay on that OS for 5+ years without being forced to something else? Thanks.

[@Welldone5202]

is FL Studio an iso file that can be added?

[@jeremiahbullfrog9288]

link to tom's video?

[@tambokavz]

Thankful

[@iamwatchingthisvid.7682]

Vanilla OS doesn't work on ventoy for some reason... the stable wont boot up while the beta version have an error during install

[@danielstellmon5330]

How many Gigabytes does "every distro on Distro watch" take up?

[@ravikishor2594]

Already using this ventoy since 2019

[@paulstaf]

I have a very tiny USB keychain flash drive that has Ventoy on it with several ISO images. It is on my keychain wherever I go.

[@rawa9891]

I forgot to mention that I also used the network to directly send the NAS Image to another NAS Samba share which was SUPER EASY.

[@jpwillm5252]

Ventoy will mark computing as knoppix did with the first live CD ! Ventoy marquera l'informatique comme l'a fait knoppix avec le premier CD live !

[@Donnie_Uy]

What I really want to know, is how he downloaded every distro from distrowatch, if it was not manually, there are around 400 of them D:

[@gumtree3050]

It's great for installing all those windows editions too

[@aromaticsnail]

Is there any trustworthy entity that can vouch that this app is safe? I couldn't even find the source code. Is it closed-sourced? If so, should we be installing OSes on our devices with this, blindly?

[@jjb7920]

I'm not sure where you looked, as the first response of a Google search, is the Github page.

[@juangabrielduransantos6364]

Love your humor 😂

[@Ax4400]

🤣🤣🤣 Thank you. I started to use Ventoy

[@ArniesTech]

One Drive to rule them all 🙏💍🧝🏻‍♀️🧙🏼‍♂️

[@douglaidlaw740]

How do I REMOVE a distro? Deleting the entry leaves it in the Ventoy list -- and bootable.. Deleting the boot entry with efibootmgr does nothing

[@ChristophHoward]

To add and remove distros you would typically add the iso file in your file manager and then you just delete the iso

[@edlippjr]

Still got my Jaz drive with PCMCIA SCSI card!

[@knightone57]

I guess I am a dummy,how do you run the tool in linux?

[@jamesdickison8991]

yes, I used both Zip and Jaz drives

[@TomSmith-sr2br]

Some ISO won't boot or don't work with Ventoy.

[@MotownBatman]

You have links & a description galore... Why no direct link to Ventoy

[@ravenedgar4112]

i remeber the old tap drive. spend all night writing code saving it. reload the next day. hoping it saved everything

[@folksurvival]

Starts at 6:57

[@kenzieduckmoo]

this is the start of Jay running Hannah Montana Linux as daily driver

[@robhowe8353]

I cant find a Ventoy download for mac os.

[@LearnLinuxTV]

I'm not seeing it either.

[@davidwayne9982]

I've had up to 30 on mine at once... but I recently found out--- if you use them a LOT-- they will begin to malfunction-- the iso files will become corrupted- and just have all kinds of things NOT WORK correctly. I thought maybe that was the issue-- so I began to make a FRESH copy of each distro I tested on ONE drive by itself- and the "problems" suddenly disappeared.. Haven't used Ventoy since. I just keep Balena Etcher on my data drvie as an appimage-- and make a new usb whenever I want one. I LOVE ventoy-- but be careful about OVER using it--- it will begin to give you issues!!!

[@billfarley9015]

Balena Etcher is my favorite Appimage. One problem with Ventoy is that you're running a live version which is useful for some things but if you really want to test a new OS you need to dual boot or multiboot. But i don't think all of Distrowatch would fit.

[@davidwayne9982]

@@billfarley9015 So what is the problem with running BE live? (not trying to be critical- curious because I want to learn.)

[@katrinaja5622]

I dont have windows/mac. How can i do in ubuntu?

[@paulharris4780]

You could spin up a virtual machine and run windows inside of that

[@paulharris4780]

Sorry for the late reply

[@georgeandrews2839]

I started with drum and tape storage and ferrite core ram... 😁

[@Trumpet-88mph]

I'm still on why many need so many different operating systems. Can anyone give me some insight?

[@henkbaas5878]

i do not see it is for macOs. only linux or windows

[@rodfer5406]

Me too!