Ventoy: Create a Bootable USB With Multiple ISO Files

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..Ventoy is a new software application for Linux and Windows that does things a bit differently. Instead of extracting an ISO image, it allows you to place the actual ISO images on the USB device so that you may boot from them directly. The program supports multiple ISO images that you can place on a USB device and uses GRUB as the boot manager.

You can transfer multiple ISO images to the device once the Ventoy structure has been created on the device using an installer. It is possible to place Windows and Linux images on the device to boot from them whenever the need arises. Updating of ISO images is a breeze as well as you simply replace an ISO image with another.

More at : https://www.ghacks.net/

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Nice find, @Alex5723. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

I’ve been using YUMI for the same purpose, so I was curious to take a closer look to see how Ventoy compares.

YUMI is really designed to extract the contents of each ISO image and copy them to individual subdirectories on the USB drive. This has several disadvantages: it requires you to add each ISO through the YUMI app; it limits your choices to ISOs YUMI supports; and it splatters your USB device with lots of extraneous files and subdirectories to facilitate YUMI’s operation. However, YUMI does have a catch-all option to add “unlisted ISOs”, which will copy the ISO intact and won’t try to extract it.

I see no good reason why an ISO’s contents need be extracted first, so the latter is really the only option I’m interested in. But that results in a two-screen menu system: the first menu is for YUMI’s extracted ISOs (empty, in my case), and an extra click is needed to get to the “unlisted ISOs” menu.

In contrast, the Ventoy app is needed only to initially prep the USB device. Once that is done, you simply copy your ISOs onto the device. The Ventoy app isn’t needed to do that. When the USB device is booted, Ventoy displays a menu of all ISOs on the device, listed in alphabetical order.

The downside is there is no menu to customize with user-friendly names for the ISOs. The upside is there is no menu needed at all — or any need to customize anything else, for that matter — and no extraneous files on the USB device to get in the way.

It’s also a whole lot easier to replace an ISO on the Ventoy device with an updated ISO, when desired. YUMI requires you to manually delete all files associated with the outdated ISO, and use the YUMI app to add the updated ISO.

I haven’t yet been able to get either app to work in UEFI boot … but that may just be my failure to understand what I need to do to make it work. I note Ventoy does add a EFI partition to the USB device, even though I’m booting it in MBR/Legacy mode, so maybe the Ventoy device can boot in either mode? In contrast, YUMI seems to require a different, UEFI version to prep the device for UEFI boot.

The following screen shots show the menus of each.

Overall, I like the Ventoy approach and think I’ll ditch YUMI.

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Elly

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@rc-primak

Do you have any addition to make of the comparison between YUMI and Ventoy?

It’s amazing how little info I seem to be able to dig up on either of these solutions, even though it should be one of the simplest things in the world.

Particularly concerning the USB format, and whether you can boot into either UEFI or BIOS mode to make a Windows installation onto either an MBR or GPT formatted disk.

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