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A New Bootable USB Solution
- DerekBickerton 5y agoLove 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.
- Kudos 5y agoI bought a few thumb drives for this and they arrived the same day I discovered Ventoy. Definitely experienced mixed emotions on that one.
- bluepoint 5y agoI wish there was an easy way to install it on macos.
- tantony 5y agoI am not sure if this is what you are asking, but you can create a bootable USB with ventoy on macos using Virtualbox. Create a VM with no storage, boot from the ventoy ISO, pass through the USB port from the host machine. I used this a couple of days back to create a bootable ventoy drive from my Macbook Pro.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago[flagged]
- rntksi 5y agoIf you worry about that just format the partition with the OS iso instead of using ventoy. Ventoy is harmless but you never know what can happen and if you're that paranoid for good reasons, having a signature file that can vouch for your iso not being modified + being 100% sure you are booting into that ISO defeats all the conveniences in the world that Ventoy or Any-other-solution gives you.
- FpUser 5y ago[flagged]
- rfoo 5y agoI'd say this is beyond paranoid (as it seems targeted), I can understand given that your handle is ngcc_HK though. FWIW, Ventoy is FOSS [1], so, the same rule holds: you can inspect the source and build it yourself. [1] https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy
- artfulhippo 5y agoLooking thru the source, there are many binary blobs. So no, this is not safe, or auditable without extensive reverse engineering.
- hyproxia 5y agoI advise you to seek a psychiatrist.
- artfulhippo 5y agoNot paranoid. There are many undocumented binary blobs. I wouldn't touch this project. Not worth he risk.
- DarmokJalad1701 5y agohttps://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/blob/master/DOC/BuildVentoyFromSource.txt https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/blob/master/DOC/BuildVentoy... Check the "Binaries" section. This was addressed in an issue: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/132 https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/132 Not sure how comprehensive that list is though.
- anaganisk 5y agoYeah, China sends its drones over other countries, invades countries over oil. Has its three letter agencies constantly invading peoples privacy. Oh wait.
- DarmokJalad1701 5y ago^This. > China sends its drones over other countries https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3147997/regional-stability-risk-chinas-growing-use-military-drones https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3147997/reg... > invades countries over oil Add commercial fishing to that as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands_dispute#Hydrocarbons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands_dispute#Hydroc... > Has its three letter agencies MPS aka Ministry of Public Security ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Public_Security_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Public_Security_(C... ) > constantly invading peoples privacy https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/19/china-police-big-data-systems-violate-privacy-target-dissent https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/19/china-police-big-data-sy... https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-china-harnesses-data-fusion-to-make-sense-of-surveillance-data/ https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-china-harnesses-dat... https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/chinas-all-seeing-surveillance-state-is-reading-its-citizens-faces https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/chinas-all-seeing-surve... Just thought I would add some sources to support your comments. Cheers!
- anaganisk 5y agoYeah thats my point, you can use that template with any super power. Thats why I didn’t use any names of countries.
- piperswe 5y agoI have my home network configured with netboot.xyz, which provides a similar experience except without using USB at all.
- AgentEpsilon 5y agoThis is a bit off topic, but I'd love to hear more detail as to your home network setup. I've seen netboot.xyz before but I have no real knowledge as to how such a setup would work.
- rntksi 5y agoWhat I did was get up a server as DHCP server on the LAN, install tftpd on it and have netboot.xyz on it. Then for other machines (inside same LAN) that you want to boot something or install a distro, you would boot LAN, the dhcp server you set up will automatically let that other machine boot into netboot.xyz and then you can choose your distro. It works really well for colocation server where you don't have the freedom to go there and plug in an Usb or a DVD because it's 1000km away in the footsteps of a hotspring in Iceland for example.
- kayson 5y agoLinux Server did a nice blog post about netbootxyz (specifically about their docker container, but it's a good read nonetheless) https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docker-network-boot-server-pxe https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2019-12-16-netboot-xyz-docke...
- brunoqc 5y agoYou can also use Pixiecore to boot it without a DHCP and pxe servers.
- piperswe 5y agoI have a Synology NAS running a TFTP server with the netboot.xyz payload, and I configured the DHCP server on my UDM Pro (https://store.ui.com/products/udm-pro https://store.ui.com/products/udm-pro) to announce the NAS's IP address as the netboot server.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoSo many competing solutions. Yet I've never used one that worked on the first try. Wonder how this one is better than the others?
- II2II 5y agoIt 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.
- zamadatix 5y agoI'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.
- moondev 5y agoWhat are the others that you have tried?
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoLatest one was Universal USB Installer [1]. [1] https://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/ https://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-a...
- artificialLimbs 5y agoI 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.
- WalterGR 5y ago> Windows PE (is that still a thing?). Seems to be. Latest release was 3 months ago, “Built from Windows 11 v21H2 code base.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Environment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Envi...
- mattowen_uk 5y agoPE exists as a 'lightweight' Windows environment and is basically what you are using as you install Windows from DVD/USB/ISO. Under the bonnet there are also command line tools included in Windows such as DISM and WinImage and good old DiskPart that can be used to edit and dump a copy of the Windows OS (as a .wim file) onto a SSD/HDD and then boot it and let it auto-configure to the hardware.
- nsonha 5y agoI remember the day I've found Sardu, it was mind blowing, but they have this ridiculous thing about naming the ISOs and copying is really slow, now with Ventoy it's just work TM. We've come a long way.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DarthNebo 5y agoThis is actually nice, I can put ISOs from any Type-C device onto this drive without worrying about needing access to another working PC in order create a bootable drive to format my own systems.
- mastax 5y agoI spent a while making the perfect portable Linux USB SSD with persistent storage and a universally mountable data partition using ventoy - then discovered that my Surface Laptop 3 can't boot upstream Linux and gave up on the whole endeavor.
- racecar789 5y agoI haven't been able to make Gandalf's WinPE image boot using Ventoy.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoHow about "Hirem's BootCD" WinPE image.
- Zircom 5y agoI've used it with Hirens with no issues other than ensuring UEFI is enabled on the computer I'm booting it on.
- codetrotter 5y agoThey have a list at https://www.ventoy.net/en/distrowatch.html https://www.ventoy.net/en/distrowatch.html of some supported operating systems. It supports most Linux distros and it also supports FreeBSD. Some operating systems that it failed to work with according to that page include, among others: ReactOS, SmartOS, Haiku and OpenBSD. They have another list as well of tested operating systems here: https://ventoy.net/en/isolist.html https://ventoy.net/en/isolist.html According to that page it supports many versions of Windows too, as well as VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Xen XCP-ng. So probably a good idea to check those two lists first before choosing which operating systems you want to use with it, if you are looking to get something that works with the least amount of effort. And if you have time to spare then try some that are currently marked as not working, or which have not been tested, and figure out how to get those working too and contribute that info to the Ventoy maintainer via their GitHub :)
- iommu 5y agoHuh, fail with OpenBSD? I have successfully installed OpenBSD 6.9 i386 on my dad's laptop using Ventoy on MBR
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"Which style should I select? MBR or UEFI? Anyway, the best for you is the best" https://ventoy.net/en/doc_mbr_vs_gpt.html https://ventoy.net/en/doc_mbr_vs_gpt.html
- austinshea 5y agoPoor translation, but the meaning is obvious: Either way. Use whichever works best for your target hardware.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoThat's why I like the answer. It's the user's choice.
- austinshea 5y agoYeah, me too :)
- skerit 5y agoAh yes, exactly what I need. I tried to create something similar in the past with some grub magic, but this seems easier to maintain :D
- yosito 5y agoThis website is missing an "installation" section or a "how the fuck do I start using this". Dear developers, even if your software is easy to install and use, don't assume that everyone knows which method you've chosen to install and use your software. There are a million ways to do things, and I can't read your mind.
- michalhosna 5y agoNot saying is super easy to find. But it's literally the second page in documentation https://ventoy.net/en/doc_start.html https://ventoy.net/en/doc_start.html
- yosito 5y agoFair enough, it's hidden under a navigation link called "Document", which isn't exactly clear.
- rzr 5y agoAny attempt to support secure boots ? or can it be signed by valid key ? BTW there is a patch to review from me at: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/pulls?q=author%3Arzr https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/pulls?q=author%3Arzr
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sireat 5y agoWhat I really miss is the read only nature of CD, DVD based boots. It is so easy to make the perfect USB only to ruin it by sticking in a "dirty" machine. The write protect switches on a few select USB flash drives are more of a suggestion than a hard detterent.
- xen2xen1 5y agoUsing with with easy2boot is better.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- retrobox 5y agoI find Ventoy really good! Saves juggling many USB drives and it worked fine with the ISOs I tested including Windows 10, Macrium Reflect’s recovery disc, and Ubuntu. I was pretty close to buying a hardware solution (iodd) but for simple needs, Ventoy seems solid.
- pppp 5y agoGetting a malware warning from virustotal.com on the download.