Creating a Ventoy Usb Stick

09 Nov, 2024

Ventoy is a fantastic way of booting many different iso’s on computers.
I have used to flash usb sticks all the time with different operating systems - which in and of itself is fine… except one having many usb sticks that need to be updated and the dreaded situation in which said sticks are not labeled… we all know where that ends.

To completly avoid that one can leverage Ventoy.

The following is a short article on how to create a Ventoy boot usb stick.

What do we need?

There are only two things needed:

A decently sized usb stick (I recommend 16GB or more - depending on how many iso’s you want to store)
Ventoy itself

Let’s get started with getting the latest Ventoy version.

Getting Ventoy

First, we have to get the newest Ventoy version from Sourceforge (Project site).

$ firefox https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/

Note: Be aware that there are different options to chose from. In our example we will download the Linux archive.

Next thing on the agenda is extracting the archive.

$ tar xzf ventoy-1.0.99-linux.tar.gz

Note: The version number might have changed when you read this very article!

After extracting we find the following archive contents.

[$ ls -lA
total 184
drwxr-xr-x 1 x x    38 Nov  9 16:49 boot
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  3111 Jun  8 11:19 CreatePersistentImg.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  3022 Jun  8 11:19 ExtendPersistentImg.sh
drwxr-xr-x 1 x x    12 Nov  9 16:49 plugin
-rw-r--r-- 1 x x  2558 Jun  8 11:19 README
drwxr-xr-x 1 x x   298 Nov  9 16:49 tool
drwxr-xr-x 1 x x    92 Nov  9 16:49 ventoy
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  1778 Jun  8 11:19 Ventoy2Disk.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x 38456 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyGUI.aarch64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x 30592 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyGUI.i386
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x 42944 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyGUI.mips64el
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x 32704 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyGUI.x86_64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  5389 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyPlugson.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  7064 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyVlnk.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 x x  2971 Jun  8 11:19 VentoyWeb.sh
drwxr-xr-x 1 x x    54 Nov  9 16:49 WebUI

Deploying Ventoy on a USB stick

There are multiple files found in the extracted archive but we are only interested in the Ventoy2Disk.sh script.

After you’ve plugged in your usb stick you need to check which device name it has been assigned.

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda           8:0    1    59G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    1    59G  0 part 
└─sda2        8:2    1    32M  0 part
...

As you can see I have a 64GB usb stick plugged in which I will use for Ventoy.

Next, change into the directory where you’ve extracted Ventoy. After that we can proceed to the installation part.

Follow the prompts and answer “y” to the questions asked.

Warning: This will delete ALL data on the plugged in usb stick!

$ sudo ./Ventoy2Disk.sh -i /dev/sda

**********************************************
      Ventoy: 1.0.99  x86_64
      longpanda admin@ventoy.net
      https://www.ventoy.net
**********************************************

Disk : /dev/sda
Model:  Patriot Memory (scsi)
Size : 59 GB
Style: MBR


Attention:
You will install Ventoy to /dev/sda.
All the data on the disk /dev/sda will be lost!!!

Continue? (y/n) y

All the data on the disk /dev/sda will be lost!!!
Double-check. Continue? (y/n) y

Create partitions on /dev/sda by parted in MBR style ...
Done
Wait for partitions ...
partition exist OK
create efi fat fs /dev/sda2 ...
mkfs.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
success
Wait for partitions ...
/dev/sda1 exist OK
/dev/sda2 exist OK
partition exist OK
Format partition 1 /dev/sda1 ...
mkexfatfs 1.3.0
Creating... done.
Flushing... done.
File system created successfully.
mkexfatfs success
writing data to disk ...
sync data ...
esp partition processing ...

Install Ventoy to /dev/sda successfully finished.

That’s it - Literally.
A Ventoy usb Stick was just created for you!

What about ISO’s?

After a successful deployment Ventoy has created a partition named Ventoy where you can simply move your iso files of choice to.

$ sudo fdisk -l
...
/dev/sda1  *         2048 123666431 123664384  59G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
...

The partition is formated with exFAT which also makes it easy to copy over iso files from a Windows system for example (Or any other system that supports exFAT).

You can access this very partition via your GUI filemanager of choice or via the shell (By mounting it to a directory of your choice).

All your ISO belong to us

We are all set.

There is nothing more to do than copying over iso files.
Depending on your needs you might want to invest into a decent usb stick that has the needed storage space and is at least a little faster than some knockoff usb stick that can barely keep up.

You can from now on insert the stick into any PC/Laptop/Whatever and select the Ventoy stick in the boot menu (Depending on the mainboard manufacturer, the key for booting varies… Mostly F8, F10 or F12 though).

Final words

I’ve used to flash many usb sticks during my lifetime, many.
Truth is that sometimes we need to boot something quickly without hassle… and the manual way of flashing one usb with one operating system simply does not cut it.

But these days are numbered!

Enjoy your new Ventoy boot usb stick and…

Stay Open!

#Ventoy #Usb #Boot #Linux #Windows #Bsd #Iso #Os