How to create a multiboot USB device using Ventoy
A multiboot USB device is a USB device (stick) that consists of various operating systems. The user can select the desired OS at startup. There are different ways to create such a device. We are focusing here on Ventoy which is rather new on the market and has got various advantages on others.
Just download Ventoy from https://www.ventoy.net/.
Note that it may be important to use the latest version of Ventoy, as some iso images may not boot from an older version.
Ventoy on Windows
Download the Windows version of Ventoy, unpack it and execute the file Ventoy2Disk.exe.
As you can see in the screenshot Ventoy can be updated using the same GUI.
Ventoy on Linux
Ventoy also offers a GUI
Just download the Linux version of Ventoy, unpack it and execute:
Enter your password:
Ventoy GUI:
Under Linux, as you may have not have a window manager, there is also a command line version.
First check where the USB stick is located:
user1@mypc:~
$ lsblk -io KNAME,TYPE,SIZE,MODEL
KNAME TYPE SIZE MODEL
sdc disk 14.9G DataTraveler_G3
sdc1 part 14.9G
In this case, the USB stick resides on /dev/sdc. Therefore, we can proceed as follows:
user1@mypc:~/apps/ventoy-1.0.33
$ sudo ./Ventoy2Disk.sh -i /dev/sdc
[sudo] password for user1:
**********************************************
Ventoy: 1.0.33 x86_64
longpanda admin@ventoy.net
https://www.ventoy.net
**********************************************
Disk : /dev/sdc
Model: Kingston DataTraveler G3 (scsi)
Size : 14 GB
Style: MBR
Attention:
You will install Ventoy to /dev/sdc.
All the data on the disk /dev/sdc will be lost!!!
Continue? (y/n) y
All the data on the disk /dev/sdc will be lost!!!
Double-check. Continue? (y/n) y
Create partitions on /dev/sdc by parted in MBR style ...
Done
mkfs on disk partitions ...
create efi fat fs /dev/sdc2 ...
mkfs.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
success
mkexfatfs 1.3.0
Creating... done.
Flushing... done.
File system created successfully.
writing data to disk ...
sync data ...
esp partition processing ...
Install Ventoy to /dev/sdc successfully finished.
user1@mypc:~/apps/ventoy-1.0.33
$
Once this is done, the Ventoy installer has created a Linux system with the Ventoy application on it on a small partition of the USB stick. Note that you never have to access that partition manually. This is what it looks like (just for your information):
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 2048 Jan 21 10:14 EFI
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 2048 Jan 21 10:14 grub
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Jan 28 16:21 'System Volume Information'
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 Jan 21 10:14 tool
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 2048 Jan 21 10:14 ventoy
You can now drop any ISO image (also supports some other formats) on the bigger partition of the USB stick. Here is an example of what mine looks like:
user1@mypc:/media/user1/Ventoy
$ ls -la
total 10750436
drwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 32768 Jan 28 16:45 .
drwxr-x---+ 3 root root 4096 Jan 28 16:35 ..
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 756023296 Jan 28 15:46 boot-repair-disk-32bit.iso
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 922746880 Jan 28 15:46 boot-repair-disk-64bit.iso
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 1663041536 Jan 28 16:45 MX-19.3_x64.iso
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 16361472 Jan 28 15:48 super_grub2_disk_hybrid_2.04s1.iso
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 732954624 Jan 28 15:44 systemrescue-7.01-amd64.iso
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 702545920 Jan 28 15:47 systemrescue-7.01-i686.iso
drwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 32768 Jan 28 16:21 'System Volume Information'
-rwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 6214653952 Jan 28 16:02 Win10_20H2_v2_EnglishInternational_x64.iso
Upon startup, Ventoy will show you a list of bootable images of which you can select the one you need.
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