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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
Am I doing something wrong?
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)
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.
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
A bit expensive, but when you rely on it for work it's worth investing a bit of money.
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.
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.
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.
I am not willing to use the software due to that issue. It just seems suspicious.
https://github.com/thias/glim
[0]: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/02/14/iodd-st400-review/
Dead Comment
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)
Kind of a pain, I think any machine that's had windows on it will get this setting enabled.
It supports multiple images at the same time, unlike the other solutions where one image take over the whole USB stick.
Love it.
And Rufus is the product of continuous improvement, maintained brilliantly.