Ventoy is indeed one of the best (if not THE best) tool for this. Even if it does not support absolutely everything (last time I checked), it is by far the most hassle free and sure-fire solution.

For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004. I honestly don't care to remember all the odd issues/failures I've encountered during those 17 years. The situation certainly got better/easier with the years, but it can still be a gamble if an odd Linux distro will actually boot successfully from USB or not.

Until I discovered Ventoy, about a year or two ago, I would always be hesitant to recommend running Linux from USB, unless I knew the exact setup (or it involved someone with a decent technical skills).

Ventoy is great!!! I'd recommend everyone to at least have a look at it. It's one of the very few tools I endorse without any hesitation or reservation.

I am in no way personally involved with Ventoy, nor do I have a stake in it. I just love the tool for what it is.

I have a couple of old dusty laptops at work, that I think are just old enough to have 32bit uefi (or bios?) and cpu with 64bit support. Are there any current distros that should work, I wonder?

I suppose I could dig up an old Debian Iso-but I'd prefer something with a recent-ish kernel (wireguard) and a half-secure libssl and opensshd.

Hm, maybe openbsd (current) still has support?

Ed: I've been doing Linux installs since the 90s... Around kernel 1.3 or there abouts - but it's been a while since dipped my toes in 32bit/hybrid x86 systems. .

> For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004.

Could you point to some good sources that explain in detail the whole "bootable USB" world? It seems it's always a hassle to get right, especially when preparing a Windows bootable USB.

rufus is good for preparing a windows bootable usb with uefi boot (so you can later enable secure boot, after install), so stick to that. ventoy is great, might be better than rufus, when you want multiple os's on a stick, but for the average person it's also way more complex than rufus. (rufus only works on windows tough)

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 anyone knows of a good resource that documents these boot arguments for a range of distros, please share!

Assuming you loopback mount the ISO, I think these are the major args... fill in the "..." wherever you see them:

  # Ubuntu
  linux .../vmlinuz boot=casper file=.../ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=...
  initrd ...

  # Arch
  linux .../vmlinuz img_dev=... img_loop=... earlymodules=loop
  initrd ..._ucode.img .../archiso.img

  # Kali
  linux ... boot=live components findiso=... # noautomount
  initrd ...

  # GParted
  linux ... boot=live union=overlay config components toram=....squashfs findiso=...
  initrd ...

In general you'll have to boot the kernels directly as shown above. Using the built-in GRUB menus won't work in many cases. Which makes it difficult to make these future-proof.

You'll also want to make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware as necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.

Best of luck getting a robust boot menu script going. Expect to spend weeks if not months on it if you're new to GRUB scripts/components.

And you can find an aggregated list of grub files for various distro's at aguslr's multibootusb:

https://github.com/aguslr/multibootusb/tree/master/mbusb.d

You can also add toram to copy the entire squashfs root to memory. This way you get better performance, and don't need to keep your USB disk plugged in.

Are you referring to grub2iso[1]? If so, I was never able to make it work: either the ISO is too large (IIRC, in the old days it needed to load the full ISO to memory), or, if it did boot, the kernel wouldn't find the ISO ("virtual drive") itself.

I only got it to work with simple things that load fully from RAM -- say, debian-installer, which only requires kernel+initrd.

It has to be simple and reliable. If it's only one of them, I would rather carry an extra USB stick which I can always format (I do).

[1]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

It was painful but I got Ubuntu ISO working with

  loopback loop (hd0,gpt1)/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  set root=(loop)
  configfile /boot/grub/loopback.cfg

which in turn seems to load the kernel via

  linux  /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  initrd /casper/initrd

if you just make sure your path doesn't have spaces. (I forget if you also need to pass boot=casper or not.)

You'll have to detect the disk though. It's possible to automate it somewhat, but not trivial (at least if you don't know how). You'll want to use search. https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/sear...

And make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware if necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.

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

Silly question, but...is your megastick just a large-capacity USB stick?

Yes.

Wow, this has justified an entire year's worth of Hacker News dues in one go.

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.

Not just iso files, it'll boot vhd's as well.

This is the real insane feature for me. Wow.

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

What a great tool! There goes my collection of small old 1-8 GB USB thumb drives, just use a big one for installs.

A nice companion could be a small *PI like board with a script that scans repositories for iso updates then downloads them using torrent to avoid taxing the servers too much, then when necessary (but not more than once every N days to avoid wearing the memory) updates the dongle automatically overnight. Just stick the dongle when you're back at home and the next morning if necessary it is updated to the latest images.

Another vote for ventoy. Means I can use my large fast USB drive (actually an mSATA SSD pulled from a broken laptop, in an adapter) as a collection of boot media while keeping the rest of the space for other use. I don't need to boot from a distro CD often these day, but when I do it is nice that it is much faster than my other USB sticks, more convenient than carrying a few (Debian, Ubuntu, psSense, Kali, ...) around, and more convenient to update when I need something new or otherwise specific for the situation.

I use a 128GB m.2 SSD in a stick enclosure with USB A on one end and USB C on the other. Whole package was $30 from Amazon.

Yeah, the adapter was cheap. I already had a working drive to go into it.

Interesting, do you have a link?

Rufus has other use cases: imaging distros for Raspberry Pi, and (especially handy) reformat HFS, APFS and Ext4 pendrives for FAT or NTFS under Windows without jumping through hoops.

Balena Etcher is great for imaging rpi as well.

It is not. hundred+ MB electron app, instead Rufus being few hundreds of KB and around 10x more flexible in corner cases.

I really despise BE from engineering perspective.

It never occurred to me to judge a flashing tool based on its internal architecture and language/framework choice.

I judge it based on whether I get a bootable bit of flash out the other side.

Rufus is just straight-up better, though? It's smaller, faster, more configurable, doesn't require installation, doesn't opt you in to analytics (wtf are they even analyzing?), and doesn't advertise the developer's other projects.

Even ignoring those last two, which just seem gross, running an entire web browser to accomplish the same thing as a 1MB native application is like using an anvil as a hammer. Yeah, it'll work, but why?

I don’t know if it’s better; it seems like it could easily be as good, but I’ll check it out the first time Etcher fails to make a working flash drive.

Besides that, every single of maybe a few dozen times i tried it, it said checksum error after verification. On different systems, with different media. Interestingly there were no errors in reality. I dismissed it as a well meaning toy for dummies. Or maybe data gathering spyware.

Thouroughly unimpressed with it and any project recommending or even insisting on using it.

Rufus has made multiple unbootable drives in the years that I've used it. Etcher has yet to made one and I used to flash drives constantly - multiple daily - until I switched to Ventoy which is the way forward now.

I wouldn't say "far better". It's different. Rufus is superb for specific tasks.

I especially like the interface, including the automatic download of the current Windows 10 ISO. I find the whole process (and more importantly, walking others through the process) a breeze.

I like the cheat mode codes that let me walk people through tasks easily, but still retaining functionality I want for myself. https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#Power_keysCheat_mo... Alt+E being one that I use myself, but absolutely would not want enabled for a novice user.

That's not to take anything away from Ventoy (although I'm an IODD user myself). Just saying one is better or worse doesn't feel fair to me.

I have been searching for something like that for ages.

Yes I just discovered this lastweek It worked fine from Linux.

I only had to patch script: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/pull/877

I guess it will be valuable to ship this in distros no ?

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/

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).

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.

This is anecdotal. I've been able to successfully install boot and install EndeavourOS with Ventoy. I've not done anything special - just install Ventoy "sh ./Ventoy2disk.sh -i /dev/sdb", copied the iso over and booted.

Does EndeavourOS support EFI boot? If not it won't work, but if so then drop a note to [email protected] and let them know!

> You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).

What the heck! How does anything else still exist!

That is a really cool project -- but, Rufus also works for boot media for machines that don't support UEFI/BIOS.

Just tried it because it seem great and it booted parted magic fine but trying to boot on W10 20H2 iso just got me stuck on a black window inside ventoy.

Too bad because I'd really like to have a single USB with everything I could really carry around instead of a bunch of small one.

Have you tried YUMI? https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

I've used it to successfully boot into both Windows and Linux. Although it's is only available for Windows, there seems to be a Linux counterpart as well, which I've never tried out: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/multiboot-create-a-multiboot-u...

I keep hearing great things about GRC's InitDisk. Unfortunately it's windows-only, but it's able to format almost anything you throw at it:

https://www.grc.com/initdisk.htm

Thanks for this, indeed I've been able to recover a stick that went non-visible anymore, by using InitDisk

Yes, this is beyond awesome. Have 64G one with all the ubuntus, CentOS, windows, grml with my keys.

Life saver.

FWIW I couldn’t get Ventoy working a while back, from MacOS, trying to boot to a Windows ISO for a bootcamp installation. That said, fully appreciate this is a tricky endeavour at the best of times!

The windows installer iso never works. You have to build a bootable PE environment and then have a folder with the install files to run.

Wow! Thanks for the heads up on Ventoy!

The only reason I even keep an old Windows based laptop around for was to burn ISO’s to flash drives with Rufus for repairing computers of friends and family members.

Previous post on Ventoy for some discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241485

One use case not covered by Ventoy is building the USB equivalent of a DOS boot disk, useful for flashing BIOSes.

This is amazing. Thank you!

Wow this is super handy!

I use Ventoy on a 500 GB portable SSD. I have Windows 10, FreeBSD, and multiple versions of each distro on it just in case. It even works with TempleOS.

All it needs now is some way to keep persistent files and I'll never need another thumb drive to install an OS.

so cool what is this fuckery

GRUB

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...

From wikipedia[1]:

> Multiple installs on the same device are not supported.

If one is limited to a single usb-stick per ISO, it's just easier to dd the installation image: run it the way it's (hopefully[x]) been tested by the vendors.

Ventoy is a different ballgame: drag & drop ISO file and boot from it. I tested it this morning with 3 things I carry around myself (debian-live, debian-installer, freebsd release installer), and it worked. 1 stick instead of 3, and I still have the remaining exFAT partition for other things. And a spare encrypted partition if I wanted to (I don't).

Regarding bugs -- it works or it doesn't for your distribution. I think it's remarkable what this, seemingly single developer, has achieved over a bit more than a year[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin

[2]: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/commit/2090c6fa978999d4ef1e...

[x]: don't get me started with Intel SSD firmware "bootable" images.

That doesn't look like it does the same thing at all.

I'm not sure why a piece of software being built by one person is sketchy but ok.

It is similar though, but yes it misses the "more ISOs" part, which I actually find weird because at that point that would be almost cheap to do - that's why I did not reverified that bit, sorry.

Unetbootin either dumps the raw ISO directly to the block device or, in the case of Windows, extracts it to an exFAT partition. Ventoy doesn't require you to extract or dump the ISOs at all, which is where the real beauty of it lies.

UNetbootin doesn't support multiple installs on the same device.