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Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#101

Post by pityJuke »

mschuster91 wrote: post #74
mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I have been searching for something like that for ages .

I know back in the day, there was a very similar tool called SARDU [0]. It is closed source from what I know, so if that was your breaking point, fair enough.

EDIT: There have also been YUMI and Easy2Boot in a similar vein before Ventoy.

[0]: https://www.sarducd.it/

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#102

Post by lathiat »

mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

A great software solution. I had a look and once Linux boots it actually uses devicemapper to map a dm device to the raw sectors containing the iso which it extracts (as it may be fragmented) to feed to dmsetup. Kinda crazy.

There is also a couple of hardware projects that to that in hardware. I used the ISOstick for many years.

You can also PXE NetBoot a lot of installers with dynamic menu selection - see http://netboot.xyz

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#103

Post by [deleted] »

Poiesis wrote: post #87
mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

For the benefit of those who may not know, this has been possible (by way of Grub2) with many Linux distros for a while now without custom software. Typically you just add extra boot arguments that point to the iso and flag that booting from it is desired. Unfortunately the required arguments tend to be poorly documented and quite specific to each distro. This looks like a neat tool that's sidestepping that issue. If…

[deleted]

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#104

Post by jhvkjhk »

mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I tried Ventoy several months ago, and go back to Rufus because it can’t boot EndeavourOS. That’s weird because every comment I saw about Ventoy is positive.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#105

Post by VMtest »

sdlion wrote: post #28

Windows images that are over 4.3GB(I don't remember the exact max size) most image burning tools will fallback to NTFS on the USB formatting and some motherboards/laptops don't like this. (Even on my rather modern Dell laptop) The best solution so far I've found is to manually partition the USB into a 1GB FAT32 partition and the rest NTFS. Then you extract the files where needed [0] I learned this method just last ye…

I used the same method as you, but from different source.

I tried to dig into my documentation for the link that I saved, it doesn't seem like I saved the google search terms for it, but they can be deduced from the link anyway.

1. https://win10.guru/usb-install-media-with-larger-than-4gb-wi...

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#106

Post by qwerty456127 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #74
mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I have been searching for something like that for ages .

For ages, there have been Zalman enclosures for making ISO-based multi-bootable external HDDs/SSDs working this way and on a lower level. And iodd which are essentially the same (AFAIK Zalman rebranded them).

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#107

Post by motiejus »

mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I just wrote Ventoy to my megastick, wrote FreeBSD and Debian Install images, and it works. Debian Bullseye install image complains about low-memory mode, but the booted machine had >500MB still available. Abstraction breaks somewhere, I would love to know why/how.

Without diving into the source code. :) Has anyone seen architecture/design documents on how it actually mounts the ISO file and "boots" from it? What does prevent "the other 10%" from not working?

I looked through the docs, found these so far:

Memdisk[1] section mentions:

> In normal mode, Ventoy will only read the iso file at booting time, and only read the content needed for boot.

Ventoy Compatible?[2] mentions a hook. What does this mean?

> Once Ventoy treats the iso file as Ventoy Compatible, it will just make the virtual disk and will not do the hook.

[1]: https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_memdisk.html

[2]: https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_compatible_mark.html

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#108

Post by tlamponi »

mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

UNetbootin has done this since 2007:

https://unetbootin.github.io/>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin>

This is barely a year old and comes all, besides a handful of comments, from one account https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/graphs/contributors

Personally and subjective this rings quite some alarm bells for me, seems just a bit sketchy and in any way really young, so not as much time out on the field and thus possibly not as much bugs shaken out...

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#109

Post by hansel_der »

yarcob wrote: post #72
mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

Holy whackamoly! Booting directly from .iso files on a thumb drive? What kind of black magic is that? This is the neatest thing I've seen on HN since the actually portable executable!

as stated elsewhere, the magic is that grub is able to directly boot a iso.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#110

Post by [deleted] »

mrjin wrote: post #66

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy. You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

[deleted]
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