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There are hardware disk enclosures that emulate an optical drive over USB and booting works on hardware level with "physical" optical drive. But how ventoy ach
by plagiat0r 3y ago
There are hardware disk enclosures that emulate an optical drive over USB and booting works on hardware level with "physical" optical drive.
But how ventoy achieve systems booting and detecting the iso programmatically? I know that initially, there seems to be grub2 reading usb file list and then it reads iso eltorito boot image and boots from it, but how exactly the OS itself know about the virtual drive? Is there an interface in uefi or bios that allow emulate optical drive, or some other standard is at play and operating systems just happens to support it? Window 10/11 pe / installer, for example, reports the iso in diskpart as virtual disk. Not an optical drive. Windows kernel actually mounts the iso somehow automatically.
Can someone point me on how this actually works, please.
- dist-epoch 3y agoI don't know the answer, but it's not required to emulate an optical drive. Modern UEFI BIOSes can natively boot from USB sticks, they can save settings and screenshots to the USB stick (thus they are not mounted read-only).
- isr 3y agogrub2 has a builtin scripting language (very much like bash/bourne), which allows you to dynamically do all sorts of stuff. I did a deep dive into grub2 years ago, and ended up creating my own sort-of-ventoy-like Swiss army knife, boot anything, grub config. In some ways, you can treat grub2 as a mini os, with a scripting language. So ... I'm sure that's how Ventoy does it (but I haven't really checked)