Diagnostics and testing? Get it all done in a flash.

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HARDWARE By Ben Myers Bootable USB flash drives are wonderful for doing many different software tasks when working on computers, but year by year they
[See the full post at: Diagnostics and testing? Get it all done in a flash.]

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fisher75, Norio, rc primak, TechTango, glnz, Casey S, firstmerk, lmacri, abbodi86, Pim, geekdom

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YUMI is a great suggestion. A possible issue might be long term data integrity? I have seen a number of references to SSD/NVME losing data if the media is not attached and “live/refreshed” for a good while. How much of a problem is this? Is there a time frame if so – weeks/months/many months/year+?
Does the same limitation apply to flash drives?

FWIW, I’ve used boot CD multi-tools in the past [Ultimate Boot CD]. I’ve also learned the hard way that a written CD doesn’t necessarily last forever either. There seems to be a rather complex relationship of brand/quality of the CD and the brand/quality of the writer that affects the longevity of the CD.

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Does the same limitation apply to flash drives?

It does.

-- rc primak

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It’s YUMI exFAT that really works best.

I am not aware of issues with long term data integrity on an SSD.  I have to believe that it is no different for an external SSD than an internal one. I have not seen any articles or postings about this phenomenon.  Can you cite any?

However, USB flash drives and SD cards are a very different story.  AFAIK, unlike SSDs inside computers, they are not manufactured with any spare data sectors or maybe they lack some sort of load-leveling algorithm. That is pure speculation by me, based upon the dirt cheap prices and empirical experience.  Of course, the manufacturers do not disclose anything about flash drive or SD card reliability or how they wear out.

When a flash drive has some number of worn out flash chips, it stops working,  I once used an SD card from a camera in a very different way, editing photos right there on the card, saving them back onto the card, and deleting poor quality photos.  One day, the SD card simply failed, both in the camera and when mounted as an external drive.  I no longer do this.

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rc primak

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That ‘information’ on long term data retention issues is something I had gotten out of discussion forums and accepted without further research. It seemed plausible.

I did a Google search on [long term data storage ssd vs hdd]. Lots of hits, most in websites that do a large amount of tech research and testing. It appears a SSD/NVME may be more subject to data loss associated with a sudden power loss while working. This does NOT appear to be true if powered off and disconnected. There would not seem to be a problem with data degrading due to not being “powered up and refreshed” periodically.

If anything I came away thinking that SSD/NVME may be a more reliable way to store data long term.

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The “gold standard” article about SSD data retention is this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention

It says, in the worst case, where a drive is used while powered on at 25C /  77F and stored at 55C / 130F, the data could be lost in 1 or 2 weeks.  If the drive is stored in a car, temperatures of 100F are possible and that retention time would be about 10 weeks.

However, if your drive is stored at 86F degrees or less, retention should be at least 28 weeks.

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rc primak

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From the cited article, first sentence of the last paragraph:

“All in all, there is absolutely zero reason to worry about SSD data retention in typical client environment.”

On a related  topic, flash drives and SD cards are manufactured to lower standards than SSDs.  I have too many of them, as the photo shows, but odds are extremely good that they still good, even after being unused for a long while.

 

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Overall, if SSD is not getting power for several years, it may lose data. According to research, an SSD can retain your data for a minimum of 2-5 Years without any power supply. Some SSD manufacturers also claim that SSD can save data without a regular power supply for around 15 to 20 years.

https://www.easeus.com/resource/does-ssd-need-power.html#:~:text=Overall%2C%20if%20SSD%20is%20not,around%2015%20to%2020%20years. 

 

-- rc primak

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The cross-platform utility appears useful, if I’m reading instructions correctly.

On permanent hiatus {with backup and coffee}
offline▸ Win10Pro 2004.19041.572 x64 i3-3220 RAM8GB HDD Firefox83.0b3 WindowsDefender
offline▸ Acer TravelMate P215-52 RAM8GB Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1265 x64 i5-10210U SSD Firefox106.0 MicrosoftDefender
online▸ Win11Pro 22H2.22621.1992 x64 i5-9400 RAM16GB HDD Firefox116.0b3 MicrosoftDefender

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It is truly useful because it is pretty intuitive to use, hence very well designed.

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While this reply is not directly related to the Diagnostics and testing… topic, it brings up a situation that I find myself in that prevents me from utilizing these tools simply because the BIOS in my old (12 plus year-old) HP-350t desktop does not support booting from USB devices. It only supports booting from an HD or CD/DVD drive. This old desktop has been a real workhorse and runs perfectly fine. I have replaced the HD’s a couple times and installed a SSD for the C: drive.

I would love to be able to somehow boot from USB but so far, the only solution seems to be to buy a new computer with USB boot capability. Any thoughts are appreciated.

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Can I add Macrium Reflect to this?  (I think it’s Macrium Reflect “Rescue” when it’s on the external USB?)

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Yes, if you can get a Macrium Reflect ISO.

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rc primak

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For Macrium Reflect in its current and future editions, you will need a separate license per USB instance. and the license is not a technician’s license, so it can only be used on one to three PCs. I don’t know what would happen if you used it on more PCs — I don’t think it has any way to record different places where it is used. But each WinPE/WinRE Rescue Environment you create with Macrium Reflect has your license key embedded. I wouldn’t want to get caught “sharing” these ISOs.

-- rc primak

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I used / still have a zalman ze200 enclosure.  USes any drive you put in there and lets you boot off the ISO.  But it’s years old / seemed to get harder and harder to select the ISO and to get the computer to boot from that ISO.  The firmware isn’t being updated.

 

I had heard of Ventoy as something like YUMI.  Never got to use / try it.

Ben – can you tell me if you tried out  several different products and settled on YUMI?  Or you just knew / had been using YUMI?

THANKS!

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rc primak

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I’ve variously used Rufus and the two other YUMIs, one for legacy boot and the other one for UEFI boot. I had previously settled on two multiboots of everything, legacy and UEFI.  I also tried MultibootUSB.exe and the Russian WniSetupFromUSB.exe , but I preferred Rufus and YUMI.  Rufus offers the possibility of formatting a USB stick as either UEFI- or legacy-bootable, but not both like YUMI exFAT.

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Ben,

Great article. Inspired me to do some testing.

Used a Samsung T-7 1Tb portable SSD.

1. After downloading Yumi I ran the program and pointed it at the T-7.
   Setup went w/o problem.
2. Downloaded the Win 10 22H2 Media Creation Tool ran it and save the ISO.
3. Installed the ISO on the YUMI partition (be careful not to install it on the install to the VENTOYEFI partition!).
4. Rebooted and used F12 to get into the Boot Menu.
5. Selected the T-7 and got the BIG RED BOX, I had tried this on my “Canary” box which has the secure boot updates enabled!
6. Rebooted and turned off Secure Boot and it booted fine.
7. Selected the Win 10 ISO and the machine rebooted into the installer.
8. Repeated this with the Avira Recovery Disk and Macrium Reflect V6 Home and both worked!

I’ll play with this some more but I’m pretty impressed as it will surely cut down the clutter when I go to someone’s home to work on their PC. Now if I can just get some ISOs for programs I use that aren’t on the list. BTW I installed the Macrium Reflect ISO using the last item on the list “Try an unlisted ISO”.

Update: After posting I went back to my main driver with the latest updates but w/o the PowerShell script to enforce the updates. It still wouldn’t boot in safe mode!
Instead of the big RED box I got a big BLUE box. “Verification failed (0x1A) Security Violation”. Rebooting and turning off Secure Boot solved the problem. So it looks like you’ll always have to turn off secure boot to use Yumi unless they update the program.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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rbailin, Awilliams

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When you say “booting from an HD or CD/DVD drive”, these drives are internal to the system?

Possibly a BIOS update?  Nope, too easy, and HP is not generous about BIOS updates.

Does the system have an eSATA port on the back panel?  If so, you could boot the system from a hard drive or 2.5″ SSD connected to the eSATA port AND with its own external power supply.

Otherwise, I think you would be out of luck.

 

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You caught me!  Yes, I omitted the essential detail that Secure Boot has to be disabled, as it would be with any bootable USB device.

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rbailin, Awilliams, rc primak

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YUMI has its strengths, but there are other ways to put together a multi-ISO USB device. A few points I have picked up over the past couple of years working with external USB devices:

First, there are other multiboot USB Flash Drive tools out there. My favorite is Ventoy.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html 

Second, I come from the world of Linux. Here, we have ISOs which are self-booting, provided Windows 11 security keys are entered at the first boot of the flash drive. Many of these ISOs when booted withn Ventoy show screens to select the Boot Method from about four possibilities. Windows-based ISOs have at least two Boot Modes. ISOs made originally for CDs have yet another one or more Boot Methods.

Combining multiple ISOs onto a common drive or SSD is the best way to conserve Secure Boot TPM keys and not have to reenter the list from a backup every time Secure Boot must be turned off if the USB drive (flash drive or SSD) is to be booted. Ventoy has an optional routine to enter the TPM key it will use for all of its ISOs. Without this TPM Key, USB devices may encounter the “Red Screen of Death” security warning.

Next, with Ventoy, all you need to do is download however many ISOs will fit on your USB device, and I place these in their own folder on external backup media. From there I pull out whatever ISOs I want to include, and just copy and paste them into the Ventoy USB device. Updating Ventoy itself is nondestructive of the ISO partition on the device. Persistence is also possible with Ventoy, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Finally, I would not be using an SSK enclosure for an external SSD. While an SSD full of ISOs will rarely if ever require the use of the Trim command, this command is not necessarily going to be passed over USB to the external SSD. Enclosures which fully support UASP and the Unmap or Discard commands (the closest many USB connected devices come to having a full Trim command) are not very common, though there are a few vendors who use controllers which do fully support UASP and its Trim equivalents.

I run Linux from USB enclosures with SATA III SSDs inside them, and I found out the hard way that the SSK enclosure I had bought did not support Trim. So that enclosure now houses the SSD from my older Intel NUC-PC. That’s essentially Read-Only these days.

There are ISOs and installers for CD use which do include the necessary TPM security keys, usually the Microsoft Keys. These will not be bothered by Windows 11 Secure Boot. For the reason I stated earlier, it is not recommended to turn off Windows 11 TPM Secure Boot. Restoring the key list is a royal pain. And the list’s capacity is limited, so you can’t register all the USB boot devices in your drawer.

Ventoy does one key registration once, on its first boot. The Ventoy site has a tutorial on how to do this. Updating Ventoy’s main program does not require reentering the TPM key.

-- rc primak

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Richard M, Awilliams, Ben Myers, oldfry

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Good thoughts here.  I need to look at Ventoy, which is embedded in YUMI exFAT to handle systems with a legacy BIOS..

I am less concerned about TRIM with an external USB NVMe drive, because it will be very lightly used compared to SSDs inside a computer.

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rc primak

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Ben Myers wrote:

I am less concerned about TRIM with an external USB NVMe drive, because it will be very lightly used compared to SSDs inside a computer.

I checked my USB Samsung T-7 using Trimcheck-0.7-win64.exe (found in the CPU-Z directory) and it shows that trim is working on the drive.

Note: you need to run the program twice to get the results!

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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rbailin, rc primak

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Under Windows, if the external SSD won’t support Trim, the drive will show up in Optimize as a Removable Drive or even as an HDD. Neither is capable under Windows of Trim. (And both might attempt defragmentation, which is not desirable for an SSD.) Under Linux you have to enable Trim (at least for Ubuntu derivatives). Once configured, invoking Trim is based on the fstrim command. This will only work if the SSD or the enclosure is capable of Trim or the UASP near-equivalent. If the SSD isn’t accessed frequently, or if it isn’t being overwritten a lot, Trim is not important.

Note: Shingled HDDs (SMR) may show up as capable of Trim. This is a valid detection, as SMR drives may be capable of running Trim, at least on their caches. Whether this is desirable I don’t know.

-- rc primak

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Ben Myers wrote:

When you say “booting from an HD or CD/DVD drive”, these drives are internal to the system?

Possibly a BIOS update?  Nope, too easy, and HP is not generous about BIOS updates.

Does the system have an eSATA port on the back panel?  If so, you could boot the system from a hard drive or 2.5″ SSD connected to the eSATA port AND with its own external power supply.

Otherwise, I think you would be out of luck.

 

Thanks for the reply Ben. I can see I should not have posted in this particular thread. However, my old HP desktop motherboard BIOS chip is not updateable. I guess I’ll just have to live with it until I can get another PC. Perhaps then I will be able to enjoy putting together some diagnostic tools that boot from USB.

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Not to worry.

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I will caution that my comments are coming from Dinosaur-ville, seeing as I gladly continue to run older, pre-TPM & Secure Boot hardware that probably dead ends at Win-10, not meeting the requirements for 11 — which I want no part of anyway.  Said hardware is still equipped with optical drive(s), and the by now vanished e-SATA which I still find very useful.  I’ve acquired many, Many, MANY flash drives, going back numerous years, of which only one — a cheap and rather off-brand –has died, thus far.  Also, crates worth of CDs & DVDs.  Failure rate there over the span of a great many years is pretty negligible, but then I scrupulously avoided the junk brands like Ritek / RiData, although some years ago that became tremendously more difficult to do, in the wake of some unfortunate company mergers and acquisitions that cut prices but also greatly diminished quality.

SSDs are a category that just never earned my trust.  I totally fried one — perhaps two  of them — via static electricity shock.  They became rather expensive paperweights.  (Yes, I know about those wrist grounding accessories, but who wears those ALL the time ?)  I have inadvertently shocked quite a few old-style mechanical HDDs in the same manner, never with any serious ill effect.  Good external drive housings come in very handy, but I’m wondering how much isolation or protection from this they would provide to a SSD ?

These reservations aside, I do like the overall premise of this article.  It did however seem to imply that most of these ISOs would be right there along with YUMI, rather than having to go out and round them up piecemeal ?  I would point out that the most useful Diag / Repair Tools collections have historically included a lot of unlicensed software — whatever one makes of that.  So it was with the full, “un-gelded” editions of Hirens, and so this carries on in the Gandalf releases.  There was also one called Multiboot-2K.  I always preferred the collections from Sergei Strelec, though especially post Feb. 2022 I have some concerns about their RU origin (fairly or otherwise), and whether any adverse tampering by state actors could possibly have been forced upon the author.

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What was implied in my article, but never explicitly stated, was that I have all the ISOs already in various folders on my system, previously downloaded and often previously used to make up a bootable USB flash drive.  For me, it was a quick and simple task to make a bootable 256GB NVMe flash drive fractionally full of ISOs managed by YUMI exFAT.

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rc primak, geekdom

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For Ventoy, updating those ISOs on the flash drive is as simple as copy/paste from the ISO downloads folder on the PC. Each ISO can be directly replaced without any issues with Ventoy’s operations. Other methods of making bootable Flash Drives may not have so simple a scheme.

-- rc primak

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My 2c (which isn’t worth much even before inflation).

I had heard of Ventoy before.  Reading Ben’s article got me thinking I should do this to consolidate my USBs (which come mostly from trade show giveaways, so aren;t that big anyway… might be why I haven’t pushed the point of finding a single drive solution. ).

Anyway, my limited expertise view: Yumi and the steps to find an ISO on the list is a bit tedious, choose that ISO’s location.  It takes a while to do a bunch of steps with that ISO.  Then repeat and repeat for each ISO ie time consuming.

And there was an update button in the app? I wound up blowing away the 2 ISOs I was testing with.  it updates YUMI, not the ISOs.  How DO you update the ISOs?  Get the newer ISO on your own, then repeat the steps for adding the ISO and then check the uninstall button to remove the old version?  Or vice versa?

It IS nice that it will get you to the download site for the iso.

Vs. Ventoy – run it on a USB, then as RC says – just dump the ISOs in the folder.  Come back in a little while if it’s a slow USB and / or lots of ISOs.

I didn’t try – can you make a folder structure in ventoy with different ISOs?  Or just 1 long list of ISOs on the drive?

 

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rc primak

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I didn’t try – can you make a folder structure in ventoy with different ISOs? Or just 1 long list of ISOs on the drive?

With Ventoy, the usual process is to just add the ISOs to the partition where all of the ISOs live, without folders. You can use Folders, but this may mess with the Ventoy listing of all available ISOs on Boot. I haven’t tried making folders within the Ventoy ISO partition, so I don’t know how this actually would work. Personally, I only have enough ISOs in my Ventoy drive so that the selection list is not forbiddingly long.

From the Ventoy documentation:

Ventoy will search all the directories and sub directories recursively to find all the iso files and list them in the boot menu.

TreeView mode 

Again, I haven’t tested these FAQ responses.

-- rc primak

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I have been gathering everything I need to give this a try. I have the SSD and a list of installs. One of them is a very large program that has been discontinued by the developer. I have the last version as an ISO file and I want to have it on this SSD project as a back up. First, will the YUMI menu let me do that and second, can I install it down the road? It is not a boot iso but just a program iso.

 

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You would not use YUMI to copy a non-bootable ISO.  There is an easier way.

First, create a new folder on the drive already built with YUMI.  Give the folder a name that makes sense, e.g. Office2019.

Next, simply mount the non-bootable ISO as a drive in Windows.

Copy the entire contents of the mounted drive to the folder you created on YUMI drive.

Unmount the non-bootable ISO.

I do the same with programs I use or install frequently, such as the .exe to install Adobe Acrobat Reader, previously downloaded in its entirety.

 

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2muchCoffee, rc primak

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Back in the day (2011) I used a similar multi-purpose program called SARDU (Shardana Anti-Virus Rescue Disk Utility) by an Italian developer. It was a bootable DVD then. You could add a bunch of utilities. Booting from the DVD gave Internet access. And you could update the tools you added. Did any of you run into this tool way back when?

Anti-virus offline rescue that updated the definitions before running and allowed deletion of the infected files: AVG, Bitdefender, f-Secure, etc.
WinPE
Recovery disks for Win versions
Runtime versions of XP, Vista
Several Linux distros
Hirem and Ultimate Boot CD
Utilities: PCTools, partitioning tools, password hacks, Registry Editor, h/w testing (mem, CPU, HDD,…)
and so on….

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rc primak

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THANKS Ben for an excellent detailed article.  Just the kind of quality detailed useful articles askwoody is known for.

Food for thought:  For the hardware to use –

Sandisk makes the Extreme Pro, which I have in 512gb, which is an SSD in a USB (A) stick configuration.  I had a need to clone my Win10 configuration for use on different hardware while RMA’ing the original hardware.  It does get warm in that usage configuration, and my usage was short term – a few weeks.  I never thought of getting an NVMe drive in an enclosure so I was looking for the (reasonably priced) fastest USB stick configuration, and settled on this.

I have used Ventoy for years, with great success and very simple operation to both update the program to newer versions non-destructively and to add/remove ISOs from the storage partition.  I have a few older Lenovo laptops that are non-UEFI, and recently worked on updating them to Win10Pro 22H2.  On one, I wanted to install 22H2 from scratch.  I downloaded the 22H2 ISO using Microsoft’s download tool.  I copied the ISO to Ventoy.  It would not boot.  I never did figure out why it would not boot.  It just went to a blank screen.  I once waited 30 minutes, just for giggles.  Finally resorted to Rufus making a dedicated 22H2 USB stick, which worked.  I never found any solution on Ventoy’s forums, though I never posted anything.  I am now determined to explore YUMI to see if it works any better.

I not only enjoyed the article, but this forum as well.  THANKS ALL.

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Update:

Spent some time exploring YUMI.  Same result as with Ventoy.  In both YUMI & Ventoy, after selecting the iso, if I select Normal mode, the screen goes black and the text underscore cursor is in the upper left corner forever.  Selecting Wimboot mode leads to the failure at the partition screen (Where do you want to install Windows?).  I get the same error – “We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one.”  When things work correctly, you just select Drive 0 Unallocated Space and hit Next, and it rips along formatting the drive and copying the files.  Using the exact same iso and Rufus on a dedicated USB drive, it works correctly.  So, there seems to be some issue I have not yet identified.

Interesting to note YUMI has some parts of Ventoy in it.

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Which ISO software did you put on the flash drive?  Which ISO did not start up properly?

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Win10 22H2 x64 which has Home, Home N, Home Single Language, Education, Education N, Pro, Pro N as OS choices when I click on I don’t have a key.  All have a date modified of 9-8-2022.  I have previously only tried Pro, as that is the version registered with Microsoft for all my hardware.  I have now tried Home, Education, and Pro.  All same result.  Size of target drive is brand new 2.5 inch Samsung 870 EVO 512gb.  So no issues of MBR vs GPT.  Size of ISO is 4,671,872 kb in Windows Explorer.  2209 10.0.19045.2006 when installed before connecting to internet, so no updates.  Downloaded using Microsoft’s Creation Tool on 4-28-2023, using tool downloaded on that date, which has file version of 10.0.19041.572.  Put same ISO on YUMI and Ventoy.  Normal mode on both ends up same result – flashing cursor in upper left corner.  I did not let it sit past 30 minutes or so.  Wimboot choice will boot the ISO on both, but when I get to the screen where you choose the partition to install, I get the same error about not being able to create a new partition.

Take the same ISO, use Rufus to install on a dedicated USB stick, works without issue.

FYI – filename = “Windows 10 2209 10.0.19045.2006 22H2.iso”

Using the next oldest build I have downloaded, again using the Creation Tool, Ventoy works successfully to install.  Tested more than once, so not a fluke.
FYI – filename = “Windows 10 2110 19044.1288.211006-0501.21h2_release_svc_refresh x64 x86 Pro Edu Home Windows.iso”

I had recently stopped downloading both x86 and x64 architectures to make the file size smaller – can’t remember that I have ever installed Win10 x86.  Today, downloaded the Win10 Creation Tool again directly from MS, downloaded ISO with x86 and x64 architectures.  File size 8, 118,080 kb.  Left filename unchanged = Windows.iso.  Chose x64.  On OS choice screen, says date modified 5-5-2023.  Type of installation = custom as I have nothing to upgrade.  Same result = “We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one.”  As in the past, creating a new partition, formatting Partition 1, then hitting next get same error.

I tried clicking on Repair your computer, Command Prompt, diskpart, and then creating a partition, assign, active.  No change.  Same error.

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There are three versions of YUMI.

I wrote about YUMI exFAT, which I think is far superior to the other two.

There is also a plain YUMI, or YUMI Legacy, meant for creating bootable media intended for use with legacy MBR systems.

Finally, YUMI UEFI is for multiboot on a modern system with UEFI BIOS and GPT disk formatting.  YUMI UEFI in no longer being updated.

It is important to distinguish among the three, even if it means more writing.

I am unsure which version of YUMI was used here.  And, yes, RUFUS is very good and very reliable for creating bootable USB drives with only one ISO.

 

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 I downloaded the 22H2 ISO using Microsoft’s download tool.  I copied the ISO to Ventoy.  It would not boot.

Ventoy may not handle the boot setup correctly for some of the ISOs you place onto it. It may very well be that if the Windows Upgrade downloads have very specific boot requirements, Ventoy cannot launch them. Personally, I would not try to put a Windows installer except for Full Retail into the Ventoy ecosystem. That’s just asking for trouble, IMHO. I have had some older Linux ISOs not boot under Ventoy because they use boot methods not supported by this program. The developers of Ventoy are well aware of this issue and do mention it on their web site.

For Windows install or upgrade media, it’s worth it to me to use a small flash drive and just follow the single-ISO instructions from the Microsoft official download page.

-- rc primak

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I’ve been using Ventoy for years, and until 22H2 have never had any problem with Win10 images.  I always use the Win10 Download Tool to get the ISOs.  The appeal of Ventoy was being able to just copy the ISO to the USB stick and not have to go through anything else.  I assumed once 22H2 came out, the basic ISO would not change.  I found out today that is not true.  It at least identifies itself by a different date on the OS selection screen.

When I use Rufus, I select MBR as the Partition scheme of the stick.  I also have Ventoy configured with MBR.

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rc primak

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Trying to set up a Yumi drive but Yumi  doesn’t see USB drive in Windows 11.  I plugged in a 256 Ortial SSD already exFAT formatted which windows sees as D: but Yumi sees nothing in the USB drop-down menu.  If I move the SSD to a Windows 10 computer Yumi sees the drive and I can continue with setup.  Any idea what the issue is with Windows 11?

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With Windows 11, it is possible that BitLocker and/or Secure Boot are getting in the way.  I have had some interesting BitLocker adventures lately.

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I had no problems with my Samsung T-7 portable SSD creating the Yumi drive on Win 11 Pro.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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seemed like creating bootable flash drive with Windows and various other tools was a good idea,  until I realized that  I would have to find and download the iso’s for all the apps. It suddenly became a time consuming process.  I had assumed, from Ben’s article, that Yumi would deal with getting the iso’s.

I may get around to it later.  I will also take a look at Ventoy.

In the meantime, I have Macrium Reflect bootable flash drives for each computer. (Need individual bootables so that they contain drivers for each computer’s hardware).  And a copy of win10, and a few utilities on flash drives.   Not too big a burden.

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If you are going to use Ventoy you have to download the iso  for those also. Same one’s will work for Yumi.

I have found that you really don’t NEED individual PC Macrium bootables. I’m all Intel, but I can boot any of my Intel PC from the same boot disk and it works.

In an odd twist  on that theme, I have an Acer/Intel desktop. When I make a boot disk, from the Acer, and test it, EVERY TIME, the resolution comes up completely wrong. It is so bad I can’t get to the lower controls. Functionally it will not work.
Frustrated I tried a number of  backup CD’s from other PC’s and found one (only one) that DOES work. I have no idea why.

I don’t think you can cross platforms successfully – Intel >AMD .
But, I haven’t tried it.

 

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