A New Bootable USB Solution

#1

Post by Uncle_Sam » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#2

Post by DerekBickerton » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

Love this. Saves me having several USB drives with different Operating Systems on them. And now you can buy relatively cheap flash drives that go up to 512GB & can stuff loads of ISOs onto it and boot into them with Ventoy.

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#3

Post by piperswe » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

I have my home network configured with netboot.xyz, which provides a similar experience except without using USB at all.

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#4

Post by bluepoint » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

I wish there was an easy way to install it on macos.

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#5

Post by hypertele-Xii » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

So many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#6

Post by zamadatix » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:27 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #5

So many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?

I've had the opposite experience, every single one works great first try but with most operating systems releasing at least twice per year these days. As such I haven't found the need to have a big list of options that I'll install more than once or twice anyways. That combined with UEFI there isn't much process to make USBs bootable.

Persistence always seemed cool on these types of tools but similarly I've never needed a persistent USB I'll boot from often enough to make the persistence more of a benefit than a burden.

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#7

Post by moondev » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

piperswe wrote: post #3

I have my home network configured with netboot.xyz, which provides a similar experience except without using USB at all.

you can also boot netboot.xyz.iso from ventoy without configuring the network :)

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#8

Post by moondev » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #5

So many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?

What are the others that you have tried?

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#9

Post by II2II » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #5

So many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?

It depends upon the OS.

I find that it is reliable for Linux and Windows. It is easy to copy an ISO onto a flash drive, it can store multiple ISOs, and those ISOs can be updated without overwriting other data on the drive. This means application installers and data backups can be stored on the same drive, making it a very convenient recovery drive.

As for other operating systems, they seem to boot partially but the boot process ultimately fails when they try to access the drive directly.

Re: A New Bootable USB Solution

#10

Post by artificialLimbs » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

I screwed around with Ventoy for a while but couldn't get it to work for my use case. This was along with a slew of other USB booting solutions including (but not limited to) unetbootin, rufus, Sardu, lili, and yumi.

We have an obscure imaging program we licensed for our Windows fleet, and I wanted to do it along with a normal Windows 10 boot on one USB connected ssd. Finally got it working after days of research with just manually creating the partitions and putting them in the right order.

I'd lay out the part table, but I'm not at work...

*edit: I feel I should mention the imaging program is Windows based, maybe Windows PE (is that still a thing?). It does the spinning Windows 10 wait animation until booted.