[fumeux_fume]

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]

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?

[toast0]

Probably not, UEFI boot is terribly fussy and I haven't seen any sort of UEFI image loader similar to memdisk that works for BIOS boot. There's an optional standard for loading images, but I don't think any of my firmwares support it; and I'm not sure if the loaded image is available after boot services terminate anyway.

Linux images have to be processed to pull the kernel and initramfs images out, rather than booting an image, and then if the image used a filesystem after boot, hope it finds it. (This is even messier for PXE, at least with USB, you have a fighting chance)

[d3Xt3r]

How are you creating your Ventoy drive? I would recommend using GPT. Also be sure to boot your drive in UEFI mode. Finally, be sure to update Ventoy to the latest version, they release regular updates with bugfixes for compatibility issues with various ISOs.

[zamadatix]

I don't think I've run into a Linux ISO that hasn't worked. I've done many versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Proxmox, Debian, Gparted, and others without issue across dozens of different machine builds. Same with various versions of Windows or ESXi.

That said, I'm not very sure what you could be doing wrong. Make sure the drive is GPT (not MBR) and isn't starting to fail perhaps. If you've been running into this on a specific machine only it could just be that machine's UEFI is buggy.

[estimator7292]

90% of the time i have failures is because Linux did not correctly finish writing the ISO to disk.

The progress bar that your file manager gives you is an absolute fiction. You must eject the drive through your file manager or run 'sync' in a terminal.

The other 10% is because UEFI decided it hates me today

[m-p-3]

I used it but I had various amount of success. I bought an HDD enclosure that would mount the ISO/VHD/FDD image at the hardware level (IODD is the brand), and that worked mostly consistently.

A bit expensive, but when you rely on it for work it's worth investing a bit of money.

[Keyframe]

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]

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]

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

[guilamu]

Never had this issue.

Tested isos: Windows 10 x64 (Pro, LTSC), Windows 11 (Pro, LTSC). I've installed windows on hundreds of computers with Ventoy and it never failed me.

[d3Xt3r]

You should be able to boot those using the "wimboot" mode.

[jaderobbins1]

Any specifics on which windows install ISOs don't work? That way I'll know which ones will need a dedicated USB stick.

[Frenchgeek]

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