Boot several ISO images from a single USB thumb drive with Ventoy

I have a few USB thumb drives in my drawer and never remember what each of them does. One was a Windows 10 installation medium, the other was Ubuntu Desktop, and so on. Mostly I will download a new ISO and just flash it again.

But that time stops now with Ventoy!

It is a USB thumb drive capable of booting from several ISO stored on the thumb drive.

The installation is super simple. Just download and run the script against a thumb drive. Be careful, this will delete all data on the drive:

sudo sh Ventoy2Disk.sh -i -g /dev/sda

This will partition the drive into 2 partitions. The second one will be available to store several iso images which you then can choose to boot off.

Now I have a single drive with the following iso images to use:

• Ubuntu Desktop - Ubuntu Desktop
• Ubuntu Server - Ubuntu Server edition for my servers
• Elementary OS - A Mac-like Desktop Linux based on Debian
• Windows - You that one
• Clonezilla - partition and disk imaging/cloning program
• Knoppix - A small live boot (German)
• TrueNAS Core - Storage OS on BSD basis

This is particularly helpful if I again mess up my tuxedo os and need to boot a live environment in order to restore my OS as I described here from a timeshift backup:

Restore snapshot with timeshift from a live medium with LUKS and LVM

Today I learned to restore a snapshot with timeshift on a LUKS and LVM installation of Ubuntu.

ajfriesenAndrej Friesen