How to Make Multiboot USB With Ventoy – Guide

If you’re looking for a new Linux distribution to try, download the ISO image from the distribution website and burn it to your USB stick using the dd command or another tool like Balena Etcher. But now there’s a new software tool called Ventoy that changes all that. Ventoy is an open source tool for creating usb bookable drives. It can be used to create a permanent, bookable drive that can contain more than one distribution at a time. The USB drive does not need to be formatted and you can copy as many ISO files as you like. Ventoy offers a boot menu to choose from. In addition, Ventoy supports Legacy and UEFI Secure Boot, supports ISO files larger than 4GB, and can be upgraded without reformatting the USB device. ..

If you haven’t already, connect your USB stick to your computer. If it doesn’t appear in the device box, click the Update button button. Now you know how to use the Ventoy tool to create a multiboot USB drive. It helps to use a single USB for multiple OS installations. You can now launch multiple Linux or Windows installations from a single USB drive.

Download Ventoy

git clone https://github.com/ventoy/ventoy.git This will clone the Ventoy project on github and will give us a git repository to work with. We can then use the following command to download the latest version of the program: git pull

Curl -L https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases/download/v1.0.14/ventoy-1.0.14-linux.tar.gz The Ventoy release 1.0.14 is available for download from the GitHub repository at https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/.

The tarball will be downloaded and extracted in one step; at the final, you should find a directory called ventoy-1.0.14 created in your current location. From now on we will work inside it:

Prepare the USB device

#!/bin/bash

Ventoy2Disk.sh - create a multiboot USB device

Usage: Ventoy2Disk.sh [-h] [-d] [-p] [-s] [-t] [–target=DEVNAME] [–size=SIZE]

Arguments:

-h help for usage instructions -d create a new multiboot USB device -p print the progress of the process -s size of the multiboot USB device to create (in bytes) -t target device to use for the multiboot USB device (in hex)

As we can see, the Ventoy2Disk.sh script uses the path of a raw block device (not a partition!) as its only argument and can be executed in basically three “modes”: if we use -i as “CMD” the script to install Ventoy on the approved block device, but will fail if a previous installation already exists. To avoid this behavior and force installation no matter what we can use -I. If we use -u, an existing installation will be updated. The script also has two options: -r takes the size in MB as an argument to preserve in final of the disk; -s enables secure boot support. Because of that tutorial I go to the /dev/sdc device on my system. To work correctly, the Ventoy2Disk.sh script must be started with administrative privileges: The Ventoy2Disk.sh script can be used to install Ventoy on an approved block device or update an existing installation. The script has two options—r to preserve disk size, and-s to enable secure boot support–and requires administrative privileges to work correctly. ..

This command will create a new disk on the local computer and write data to it.

As soon as we give confirmation, the script will start working. Two partitions will be created on the device: the first will take up almost all available space on the device and will be formatted as exfat; the second will be used as esp and formatted as vfat.

Fedora’s exfat-utils and fuse-exfat packages must be installed in order to mount the partition on our distribution. In certain cases, such as the latest version of Fedora, we may need to obtain the necessary software from external repositories.

Copying the ISOs

  1. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (64-bit)
  2. CentOS 7 (64-bit) To place the ISO, we need to use the following command: sudo apt-get install iso-builder iso-tools mkisofs cd iso-builder /usr/share/iso/ubuntu16.04.x86_64/ mkisofs -o ubuntu16.04.iso /boot/vmlinuz sudo cp ubuntu16.04.iso /boot/vmlinuz /etc/fstab

Clonezilla 2.6.4-10 is a stable and up-to-date clone of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. It is a fast, secure, and easy to use browser that can be used on any computer.

Fedora 32 server x86_64 netinstall is a Fedora 32 installation that uses the netinstall tool to create a new Fedora 32 system.

Test the USB device

We install Ventoy and use it to create our multiboot device, then copy the images we want to include in our boot menu; all that’s left to do now is test that our configuration works correctly. To do this, we don’t need to restart our machine: we can test the USB device using Qemu.

lsusb -v | grep “Corsair Survivor Stealth Flash Drive”

Corsair Survivor stealth flash drive: ID 1b1c:1a0a

lsusb -v This will list the devices on the system, including the device with the hostbus number of 002 and the hostaddr of 007.

This command enables the KVM virtualization support and sets the USB device to use bus 2 and the host address to 7. ..

If everything is ok, at this moment, Ventoy should open a new window where we can see the grub menu generated by it with the lines related to the images that we copied in the previous steps. ..

Final note

This guide will show you how to create a multiboot USB drive with Ventoy. If you have any questions about the process or the steps, feel free to ask us in the comments below. Sharing this guide with your friends is also very appreciated! ..