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Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files

289 points| wilsonfiifi | 4 months ago |github.com

121 comments

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fumeux_fume|4 months ago

The nice thing about Ventoy—and I didn’t fully appreciate this until I used it—is how simple it makes bootable USBs. You just drag and drop ISO images onto the drive, and it can hold as many as will fit. When you boot from the Ventoy USB, you just pick the image you want to install or run—no re-flashing, no fuss.

It’s honestly wild how convenient it is. Ventoy was the only method that worked for me when I needed to install Windows alongside an existing Linux setup for dual-booting. Everything else I tried failed, but Ventoy handled it perfectly.

stavros|4 months ago

I would love it if it worked well, but it's been really flaky for me. Maybe half the ISOs work, the rest get various errors on boot and fail. These are Linux ISOS, too, which I would have expected to work.

Am I doing something wrong?

Keyframe|4 months ago

It's truly special. I haven't seen that before. It doesn't work always, with all OS' though, but when it does - it's great.

PaulKeeble|4 months ago

I used to have a pile of USB drives for this purpose, with various different images on them. I had a windows, linux and memory tester 86 plus and occasionally needed to flash something like clonezilla or gparted. Nowadays I have a fast USB4 capable flash drive which just does all this faster and a whole bunch more ISOs on it and does bios duty too.

One other small advantage is with secure boot you only need to register Ventoy once with a machine and then all the ISOs will boot, whereas with different USB sticks and images each has to be registered individually and some of them don't work with secure boot so you have to turn it off. Just another convenience.

nutjob2|4 months ago

Notably Ventoy doesn't work with some Windows install ISOs.

Frenchgeek|4 months ago

It sure make it easy to boot a 64bits OS on a 32bits UEFI machine...

mkesper|4 months ago

The lot of (partially scary) binary blobs is still an unsolved issue: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/3224

AnotherGoodName|4 months ago

I am actually happy reading that though. As in it's literally the authors of the tool stating "hey we have a lot of binary blob drivers, what can we do to replace these?". He then audits them and links to build instructions.

As in yeah there's precompiled binaries in this. But it's audited and each binary itself has a link to build instructions. What they are not doing is actually building everything from scratch in their build process. Ok that's a pain to do and i get it. But... i don't see anyone slipping in an unaccounted for binary here right? If every binary itself has a "here's how to build this from scratch" documentation and source it seems ok to me.

dataflow|4 months ago

I don't see the problem with grabbing binary blobs from other trusted projects. Isn't it sufficient just to be able to prove the hashes match what you'd get directly from the origin? If you got your blob from (say) Debian, and their blobs were backdoored, the world has... much bigger problems to worry about. Feels like trying to verify that your pharmacy is making your medication from scratch, lest their supplier had contaminated it.

dang|4 months ago

Related. Others?

About the BLOBs in Ventoy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44810281 - Aug 2025 (57 comments)

Ventoy Is Saving Me Time, Money, and USB Sticks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933664 - May 2025 (2 comments)

iVentoy installing unsafe Windows Kernel drivers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909824 - May 2025 (8 comments)

Ventoy: Remove BLOBs from the Source Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689629 - June 2024 (49 comments)

Ventoy – Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619822 - June 2024 (19 comments)

Ventoy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672112 - Dec 2023 (111 comments)

Ventoy: A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055765 - May 2023 (1 comment)

Ventoy, ISO USB Solution 10/10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901483 - Sept 2022 (4 comments)

A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28889392 - Oct 2021 (47 comments)

Ventoy makes making bootable USB drives easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273289 - Aug 2020 (11 comments)

Ventoy: A new bootable USB solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241485 - Aug 2020 (106 comments)

Ventoy – A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394714 - June 2020 (6 comments)

Ventoy: Boot different ISO files from a USB stick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060019 - May 2020 (1 comment)

steelbrain|4 months ago

Love Ventoy! I never have to flash my USBs anymore. Just keep dropping those ISO files in there. Highly recommended.

canistel|4 months ago

Same here. You can drop as many ISO files as you want and select during boot...

fullstop|4 months ago

I really like the idea of this, but I've run into several installers which are just incompatible with it. I don't remember which ones, unfortunately, but they just didn't deal with it well.

WaxProlix|4 months ago

If you have secureboot enabled and in Windows friendly mode, you can get validation failures with Ventoy until you either turn off secureboot, register the Ventoy MOK key, or change your secureboot setting to Generic OS (or whatever).

Kind of a pain, I think any machine that's had windows on it will get this setting enabled.

starky|4 months ago

Agreed, I've run into just enough installers that don't work with Ventoy where I've just defaulted back to using etcher when I need access. The 5 minutes wait is worth it over the frustration of booting into Ventoy and finding it doesn't work with the ISO I'm trying to use.

mhurron|4 months ago

Ventoy basically breaks openSUSE ISO's. Just mentioning that so maybe it'll show up more in searches.

dspillett|4 months ago

I've seen an installer get confused by the presence of an EFI partition on the stick, and not correctly create one on the target drive. There are probably ways to get around that, but I just made a separate USB stick for the installer (I had a spare stick floating around, and the tools handy (including on at least one of the live CDs on the ventoy stick)) and retried that way, which was probably faster than researching another method.

finalarbiter|4 months ago

Agreed. I have also found that some (dirt cheap) USB drives are incompatible with Ventoy entirely, being that it does not format the drive properly. I can drop ISOs all I like, but if they don't boot once I select them... Unfortunately I have resorted to using my trusty "pile o' flash drives" I've had for a decade.

Liquix|4 months ago

IME this can sometimes be resolved by selecting 'use grub2 mode' instead of allowing the ISO to boot normally.

mbirth|4 months ago

It’s mostly obscure ISOs for e.g. ReactOS and KolibriOS that don’t work for me. But normal Linux- or Windows-based ISOs all boot fine.

mongrelion|4 months ago

I was going to ask how this would be better than any of the other options out there (like dd, the RPi imager and similar) but after seeing the README I consider this the superior alternative because you don't have to reflash the USB stick over and over again.

It supports multiple images at the same time, unlike the other solutions where one image take over the whole USB stick.

Love it.

indigodaddy|4 months ago

Ventoy wouldn't work for a rpi though would it?

jnovacho|4 months ago

How does this differ from Rufus [0] or Balena Etcher [1]? [0] https://rufus.ie/en/ [1] https://etcher.balena.io/

HenryMulligan|4 months ago

Both of those write a single ISO to your USB stick, while Ventoy allows you to store numerous ISOs in a folder on the stick and choose which to use at runtime. Also, you can store other files like normal with the remaining space on your stick.

yonatan8070|4 months ago

Rufus and BalenaEtcher are both programs for flashing an image to a disk. Ventoy is flashed onto the disk itself (into a small EFI partition), then the rest of the disk is just a regular file system, where you drag and drop a group of ISOs, then pick between them on boot.

fullstop|4 months ago

Those let you write one image to a USB stick. With Ventoy you write the bootable part once, and plop as many ISOs on there as you want. You get one bootable device where you can select from a list of ISOs.

gamedna|4 months ago

I absolutely love ventoy and iventoy. They are amazing! Now I use this device : the IODD ST400 and never looked back. https://www.iodd.shop/IODD-ST400-USB-30-External-Encrypted-H... . The screen lets you pick, and swap the ISO on the fly, even enabling multiple to be mounted at the same time. This device even supports virtual hard drives and virtual floppy drives.

canada_dry|4 months ago

I'm curious why a GRUB based replacement for ventoy isn't popular? SSDs are ubiquitous/inexpensive.

SSD+USB+GRUB with either a single GRUB partition and multiple ISO files stored in subdirectories, OR one parition per ISO/OS.

Adding new ISOs would require some manual editing of the grub config but wouldn't this be a decent substitute??

Like many people I'm hesitant to use an OS installation tool that has not been thoroughly reviewed to ensure there is no malware in binary blobs.

ac29|4 months ago

I'm curious about this too.

Alternatively, does anyone know if you can install Ventoy to a partition on an internal disk? The documentation says it supports booting images stored on local disks, but doesnt say if Ventoy itself can be installed on a partition as opposed to an entire disk.

037|4 months ago

One nice thing about Ventoy is that you can still use the USB stick as a regular drive for other files — it doesn’t interfere with the ISOs you can boot from

giuseony|4 months ago

Long time ventoy user, here. I absolutely love this software, there's always a usb stick with ventoy and a bunch of useful isos in my pocket.

The really intriguing feature is the ability to run vDisk files (as long as there's a linux distro within it) thanks to the VtoyBoot plugin[1]. I'm actually trying to build my own customized arch version with all my software (and potentially keys) installed so I can get rid of having to bring around any hardware. The only problem I'm facing is that it seems that ventoy boot does not work very well with luks containers.

[1] VtoyBoot plugin: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html

franga2000|4 months ago

Ventoy is great, but what I really miss is DriveDroid from the good old days. It still exists, but it's not quite as reliable on modern Android as it was on rooted Cyanogenmod back in the day and the distro download links have rotten away.

For those not familiar with it, it turns your Android phone into a USB DVD drive, meaning not only can you just download and host any distro with a few taps, you also don't need any hybrid ISOs or anything like that, the computer sees a real DVD so even old or weird machines accept it.

chenxiaolong|4 months ago

I wrote https://github.com/chenxiaolong/MSD for exactly that. It's a small wrapper around the Linux kernel's mass storage emulation support (CONFIG_USB_CONFIGFS_MASS_STORAGE). It can emulate a read-only optical drive, a readable disk, or a writable disk.

It is compatible with both older devices that configure USB via init scripts and newer devices that use Android's USB gadget HAL, but it does require Android 11+.

winkelmann|4 months ago

I've been using an IODD 2531 enclosure for many years now, and it's doing pretty much exactly that. It works with any ISO I throw at it and has no issues with Secure Boot. It’s also platform-agnostic as it acts as a USB optical disk drive.

There are some shortcomings, like a bug where it doesn't remember the last selected ISO if its filename is too long, files also need to be fully sequential. These might be fixed in their newer models (the 2531 is fairly old).

fuzzfactor|4 months ago

As far as I can tell, a great many Android phones have always been able for their SD cards to serve as read/write external storage/bootable drives for PC's when connected by USB cable.

You have to format the SD card in a PC first, perhaps also repartition beforehand.

Even the old Sony smartphones before there were iPhones could do it with their MemorySticks. I really do miss the non-Android non-iOS smartphones.

fukka42|4 months ago

Such a shame Google & Apple refuse to let us use our devices to their full potential.

nelblu|4 months ago

Long time ventoy user. For someone who loves to flash or try out different Linux distros all the time, this is a godsend.

I would also highly recommend iventoy, if you want to just boot using network device : https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html. It came in very handy when I had a machine which only had a CD/DVD ROM, floppy and netboot option. I didn't want to waste a DVD-R so just booted via network.

fadedsignal|4 months ago

I learned about the tool very late. I wish I had known the existence of this tool earlier. I carry a USB stick with Ventoy, which includes 2-3 ISOs. It's a lifesaver.

jonbiggums22|4 months ago

Is it possible to boot a full windows install from this (probably using a VHD image)? I know it would be slow but it would be nice to have something with all my utilities.

kzshantonu|4 months ago

You don't have to store the vhd file on the ventoy device. You can keep it on an internal partition and boot from that. After that, the ventoy drive doesn't have to stay plugged in

gunalx|4 months ago

Should be doable yes.

anonymousiam|4 months ago

Ventoy is cool and I've used it to boot many different operating systems. The one OS that I've had issues with is FreeDOS. Ventoy will boot it, but I've been unable to access any media on the target system. I'd like to be able to access a separate USB drive, or a hard disk. Maybe there's some trick to doing this that I'm unaware of...

fuzzfactor|4 months ago

Booting to DOS you have to plug in other target drives before you power up so the BIOS will recognize them first before DOS boots.

Also DOS will not recognize files on anything but well-tempered FAT32 volumes usually, and the drive device needs to be MBR layout, not GPT. Plus the motherboard needs to support legacy CSM and have it enabled unless it's an old native-BIOS-only non-UEFI PC.

daeken|4 months ago

Ventoy is a lifesaver. I dropped a 2TB NVMe drive into a USB-C enclosure and put it on there, along with all the OS installers, distros, and test utilities I commonly use. Probably used it a few dozen times since then and it's well and truly paid for itself!

ChuckMcM|4 months ago

FWIW, the last time I tried ventoy (early 2025) some ISOs would screw up the USB stick if you tried to boot them (and by that I mean the USB stick would no longer boot anything).

pocketman|4 months ago

Wonder about it working with NetBSD? Noticed it is not on their list of tested Unix distros, and can't remember if I ever tried it with Ventoy.

gunalx|4 months ago

This is real good also wfor installing win11, because it at least did the local user and requirements bypass patches last time i used it.

VagabundoP|4 months ago

The only issue with Ventoy is it doesn't work with secure boot turned on.

Otherwise its excellent.

zettabomb|4 months ago

It does, but you need to enroll its MOK key. If that's acceptable for you, it'll work just fine.

leosussan|4 months ago

Honestly, an essential piece of kit. I've used it across a couple of different contexts & have only positive things to say about it.

not4uffin|4 months ago

I’ve apparently already starred the repository.

hei-lima|4 months ago

Ventoy is great bc it just works. No BS, just drag and drop your isos and BOOM! Bootable usb with MULTIPLE isos. Really great software.

Fokamul|4 months ago

In perfect world, Microsoft would help to create this tool.

Nope, they don't have time for this. Too much work om security through obscurity, making crap SW which eats RAM like hamburgers and disabling local accounts...

DrewADesign|4 months ago

I think that’s a really unfair portrayal of Microsoft’s product management. They spend a lot of time— even more than on some of the things you listed — creating GUI frameworks to ignore, injecting creepy analytics for their war on privacy, obfuscating those analytics and stymieing users efforts to avoid them, and figuring out terrifying new definitions for the word experience.

evanjrowley|4 months ago

Also, adding Copilot to everything.

fuzzfactor|4 months ago

>eats RAM like hamburgers and disabling local accounts...

Those are the kind of hamburgers that make people say "Where's the beef?"

jy14898|4 months ago

ramburgers are quite healthy, they've been shown to improve memory

thefz|4 months ago

Stretching your hate for the company a bit too far, don't you think? I mean all the cool kids do it, but you can't blame them for not having done this.