Ventoy is an OS.
It’s a live Linux that boots from the USB stick you format/image with the ventoy tool. The rest of the space on the USB stick is configured to be essentially a standard USB drive.
The live Linux’s sole purpose is to boot another image stored on the USB stick.
So, once you have "ventoy"d a usb stick, you can plonk gparted live iso, Ubuntu, Debian, Eos, W10, W11… whatever isos you want. When you boot from that USB stick, you get the ventoy menu screen and select the iso you want it to continue to boot.
Oh yeh, saved my skin a few times.
And you can use it like a normal USB stick once your OS is up, so you can have some installers on there to speed things up
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.
What’s ventoy?
a thing you install in a usb stick that allows you to have multiple bootable isos
like you can have the mint and arch isos on the same drive and etc
Oh, I always partitioned when I needed to do that. This seems easier though, thanks!
Is it like Rufus but fancier?
Ventoy is an OS.
It’s a live Linux that boots from the USB stick you format/image with the ventoy tool. The rest of the space on the USB stick is configured to be essentially a standard USB drive.
The live Linux’s sole purpose is to boot another image stored on the USB stick.
So, once you have "ventoy"d a usb stick, you can plonk gparted live iso, Ubuntu, Debian, Eos, W10, W11… whatever isos you want. When you boot from that USB stick, you get the ventoy menu screen and select the iso you want it to continue to boot.
Basically, a bootloader on a usb stick
Ventoy should become more popular with sysadmin as having your entire recovery stack on a single usb is a good quality of life change
Oh yeh, saved my skin a few times.
And you can use it like a normal USB stick once your OS is up, so you can have some installers on there to speed things up
Ventoy is just the grub bootloader.
Oh that’s pretty slick thank you for the info
Other useful bootable tools are MS DaRT and Hirens Boot Disc (is that still a thing? Haven’t used it in a while.)
The drive is also still usable for bulk storage, so a big one is still a great option. I’ve got it set up on a nice small form factor 256GB usb.
Source
Its like grub but for your iso’s. You install ventoy, drag your iso’s into the ventoy folder and bam you got a grub like selection of all your iso’s