[HN Gopher] Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VH...
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Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files
Author : wilsonfiifi
Score : 253 points
Date : 2025-10-30 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| steelbrain wrote:
| Love Ventoy! I never have to flash my USBs anymore. Just keep
| dropping those ISO files in there. Highly recommended.
| canistel wrote:
| Same here. You can drop as many ISO files as you want and
| select during boot...
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| 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.
| gunalx wrote:
| Should be doable yes.
| haunter wrote:
| It can directly boot into any VHD image
| https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vhdboot.html
| kzshantonu wrote:
| 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
| daeken wrote:
| 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!
| mongrelion wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ventoy wouldn't work for a rpi though would it?
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| finalarbiter wrote:
| 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.
| mhurron wrote:
| Ventoy basically breaks openSUSE ISO's. Just mentioning that so
| maybe it'll show up more in searches.
| rombert wrote:
| Adding an official source:
| https://fosstodon.org/@opensuse/115451506225628859
| zettabomb wrote:
| First I've heard of it, I just installed an openSUSE variant
| through Ventoy a week or so ago.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| 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.
| Liquix wrote:
| IME this can sometimes be resolved by selecting 'use grub2
| mode' instead of allowing the ISO to boot normally.
| starky wrote:
| 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.
| mbirth wrote:
| 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| I wish that I could remember which Linux distribution that
| balked at it. It wasn't an obscure one, though.
| dspillett wrote:
| 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.
| gunalx wrote:
| 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.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| 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.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Notably Ventoy doesn't work with some Windows install ISOs.
| jaderobbins1 wrote:
| Any specifics on which windows install ISOs don't work? That
| way I'll know which ones will need a dedicated USB stick.
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| Last week I tried to make a bootable usb with windows 11. I
| tried using dd on macos, and that seemed to work, but the
| windows installer errored about "not finding drivers for
| the hdd". This threw me off because I thought something was
| wrong with the nvme.
|
| Turns out you can't just dd a windows iso onto a usb drive.
|
| You have to format it to fat32, then manually copy all the
| files. However there is one big installer file which is
| above 4gb, so you have to get some tool (also provided by
| Microsoft) to split the file into multiple files less than
| 4gb. The windows installer will recognize the split files
| and use those instead.
|
| It's beyond me why the official windows iso just doesn't
| have this by default...
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Don't know why you're being voted down, this was exactly
| my experience, and from all reports, correct.
|
| But instead of the process you describe (which some tools
| will do for you) I used Rufus to copy the install files
| onto a USB formatted as a NTFS partition, working around
| the 4GB limitation.
| guilamu wrote:
| 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.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Lucky you. I'm not sure why it happened to me and not you,
| but it's a real problem and others have had it too.
|
| It manifests itself as the dreaded "a media driver your
| computer needs is missing" error message when trying to
| start the install.
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| You should be able to boot those using the "wimboot" mode.
| Keyframe wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| 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?
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| 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.
| organsnyder wrote:
| > I would recommend using GPT
|
| Perhaps this is obvious to many in this context, but this
| refers to the partitioning scheme for the disk--not the LLM
| service.
| bombcar wrote:
| ChatMBR.
| munchlax wrote:
| I've replaced all my GPT disklabels with Sun disklabels
| because I refuse to let them talk.
|
| UEFI still boots. Spec said it can boot from fat in an
| eltorito floppy image and sun disklabels sit in the
| second or so sector. Spec also said it abstracts the type
| of volume so all boot methods always work for all drives.
| ISO images don't use the first 4kB so it doesn't see
| there's disklabel at all
|
| So now I can mount the ssd as iso9660 but there's also
| partitions on it of which the third spans the entire
| drive (of course, because that's the c partition)
| stavros wrote:
| Hm yeah, I think I used MBR with BIOS. I do upgrade Ventoy
| regularly, but I think you may be right, I think the issue
| was with something about the BIOS. I'll try that, thanks!
| toast0 wrote:
| 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)
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| I'll try a few things, thanks. I think last time it was
| Debian that wasn't working, so it's not even anything that
| out there. I'll try a few things, thanks!
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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
| stavros wrote:
| I always eject/sync the drive, but I'll triple check next
| time, thank you.
| Frenchgeek wrote:
| It sure make it easy to boot a 64bits OS on a 32bits UEFI
| machine...
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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.
| mkesper wrote:
| The lot of (partially scary) binary blobs is still an unsolved
| issue: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/3224
| hddherman wrote:
| If anyone is wondering, then there are Ventoy alternatives like
| IODD [0], but they are not perfect. Usable, but annoying in
| some aspects.
|
| [0]: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/14/iodd-st400-review/
| theodric wrote:
| So far I am 0/2 on buying IODD devices and having them fail
| within a couple of weeks. I gave it a good 5 years between
| purchases and bought a different version of the unit. Perhaps
| I just have extremely bad luck, but my experience is that
| basically anything is more perfect than an IODD.
| seemaze wrote:
| An alternative was offered here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41959908
|
| https://github.com/thias/glim
| 867-5309 wrote:
| does not support Windows
| Sammi wrote:
| https://github.com/eugenesan/glim
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| And crucially, since each blob is from an open source project
| with build instructions, it seems like you _can_ build Ventoy
| completely from source if you really want.
| graton wrote:
| The binary blob issue has been brought up since back in 2020.
| And since then very little real progress has happened from
| what I can tell.
|
| I am not willing to use the software due to that issue. It
| just seems suspicious.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Just to be clear do you understand that all of these are
| built from source with documentation so you can recreate
| the binaries yourself?
|
| As in it's completely source buildable with no unknown
| binaries. They just don't have a single 'build' that pulls
| all of these in and builds them at once. Instead you're
| following the build instructions for each part, creating
| libraries that you then link together at the end. This is
| due to the pain in the ass of cross-compiling
| Linux/Windows/UEFI binaries all in the one project. It's
| pretty reasonable.
| graton wrote:
| Have you done this? How do you know this is true? Are
| there reports of trusted 3rd parties who have verified
| this?
| dataflow wrote:
| 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.
| fadedsignal wrote:
| 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.
| spiantino wrote:
| Ventoy rocks
| not4uffin wrote:
| I've apparently already starred the repository.
| jnovacho wrote:
| How does this differ from Rufus [0] or Balena Etcher [1]? [0]
| https://rufus.ie/en/ [1] https://etcher.balena.io/
| HenryMulligan wrote:
| 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| 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.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| Unlike Balena Etcher, Ventoy is not a bloated Electron app that
| sends telemetry from your computer: https://github.com/balena-
| io/etcher/issues/3784
| encom wrote:
| I just cannot fathom how a 450 MB dd frontend is taken
| seriously, instead of being the subject of relentless
| mockery.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| 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.
| Fokamul wrote:
| 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...
| evanjrowley wrote:
| Also, adding Copilot to everything.
| LollipopYakuza wrote:
| Microsoft provides a tool called "Media Creation Tool"
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows11
|
| But of course it's highly simplified and designed solely for
| installing Windows.
| tomwojcik wrote:
| For Windows and FROM Windows.
|
| I swear the most recommended way of creating a bootable
| Windows USB on Linux changes every year, and usually doesn't
| work. I keep an old Windows laptop just so I can create
| bootable Windows usbs, whenever needed.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| For as long as Windows has supported UEFI, you've just been
| able to copy the files from the ISO directly to a UEFI
| partition.
| pxc wrote:
| Making custom Windows install media is insanely painful,
| even from Windows. I went through the process of creating
| non-interactive install media for Windows once, and was
| astonished at how awful it is compared to building custom
| Linux live media. (Not least of all because of the churn in
| the XML you have to maintain that basically represents
| clicking through all the installer menus.)
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| WAIK? I created a customized Windows install image as a
| 19 year old intern and presented it to the rest of the IT
| team...
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| It depends on what customizations you'd like to use.
|
| I've also had a very hard time creating an automated
| install media for an appliance for windows iot... Worst
| was the (LLM generated?) powershell scripts in the
| documentation that didn't work at all.
| pxc wrote:
| Microsoft's tooling for customizing images amounts to
| several gigabytes to download and install just to get
| started.
|
| The Windows approach is based on a mix of relatively
| limited offline modifications and automating clicks and
| keystrokes (AutoUnattend.xml, OOBE.xml) and recording or
| forgetting manual changes (Audit Mode, Sysprep). Both are
| insanely kludgey.
|
| New development of the tooling always comes to dism.exe
| first rather than the DISM PowerShell module, so you may
| need to use DOS commands instead of the (very lovely)
| modern shell that Microsoft maintains.
|
| Depending on what kind of stuff you're trying to install,
| you might need to do half a dozen reboots in the course
| of recording your manual changes.
|
| Mounting/unmounting a WIM file can take more than a
| minute (wtf?) and if you're working on modifying one of
| the installer images from upstream, you need dozens of
| gigabytes of free disk space.
|
| If you don't just want install media, but a bootable
| repair environment, everything is even worse. Hardware
| recognition is bad, boot is slow, and only some programs
| can actually run in a WinPE environment.
|
| Have you ever customized bootable Linux media?
|
| When I had to make some custom NixOS install media for an
| aarch64 VPS, it required only a few lines of code in the
| exact same environment as I use to customize running
| systems, and it's completely declarative, non-
| interactive, requires no special toolkit, doesn't require
| dozens of gigabytes of scratch space, never requires me
| to boot anything...
|
| Teenage interns can also shovel manure, but that doesn't
| make it pleasant or painless!
| thefz wrote:
| 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.
| jy14898 wrote:
| ramburgers are quite healthy, they've been shown to improve
| memory
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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_.
| leosussan wrote:
| Honestly, an essential piece of kit. I've used it across a couple
| of different contexts & have only positive things to say about
| it.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| The only issue with Ventoy is it doesn't work with secure boot
| turned on.
|
| Otherwise its excellent.
| zettabomb wrote:
| It does, but you need to enroll its MOK key. If that's
| acceptable for you, it'll work just fine.
| haunter wrote:
| It works as long as you okay with their key provisioning
| https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_secure.html
| 037 wrote:
| 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
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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).
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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...
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| fukka42 wrote:
| Such a shame Google & Apple refuse to let us use our devices to
| their full potential.
| winkelmann wrote:
| 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).
| d3Xt3r wrote:
| There's also USB Mountr (aka PhoneStick)[1], but of course YMMV
| with modern Android. Might be better to use a rooted Android
| with the DriveDroid + the Magisk compatibility module[2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/JinbaIttai/phonestick
|
| [2] https://github.com/overzero-git/DriveDroid-fix-Magisk-
| module
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| hei-lima wrote:
| 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.
| pocketman wrote:
| 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.
| nelblu wrote:
| 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.
| gamedna wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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