Ventoy – Bootable USB Solution | Hacker News Reader

Ventoy – Bootable USB Solution

github.com

54 points8organicbits19 comments

Be careful! The source contains lots of blobs, not much is known about the author ( I only know he is from China *). This project would be a very fat target for anyone liking to get the most unfettered root access imaginable, because many system administrators will happily plug this in while installing OSes.

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* I hate to make this remark, as this could indeed be someone happily doing his hobby. Otoh, after xz we should be more vigilant than we were already.

Are there more transparent (blob-less) equivalents to use??

For Linux, yes, the Arch wiki mentions some. But if you want to add Windows as an option, I don't know one.

Fantastic tool. Been using it for years, saves me the headache of loading my trusty USB drive with the latest Linux ISO when setting up a new machine. I also keep a few other ISOs like a recent Windows version just in case I need to perform a repair on a friend/family's machine, memtest86, dban, etc.

+1 to everything you said. Before I had an elaborate USB setup with several partitions for my multiboot stick, mostly for installation and rescuing. Now I just need to copy the ISOs and I'm done. So easy to use and update.

Only found out a couple of months ago but you can also boot virtual disk images! I had an old vhd file that I wanted to boot on real hardware and actually worked!

Anyone managed to install Ventoy on a SSD/HDD (so not a flash drive) partition with preferably working with GRUB? Like a persistent install on the disk with its own partition alongside my regular stuff.

Apperently it is supported but it never worked for me for some reason.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/faq.html

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_disk_layout.html

Have you tried doing the install on an ssd with a usb adaptor?

I haven't done this with Ventoy, but it has worked for me in the past on a couple of distros. There is something that is seen differently when it is thru USB, I believe but not sure.

Some discussion from December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672112

So, how does it actually work?

In the common case:

Boot Ventoy application via GRUB/EFI

Ventoy EFI application scans the same drive it booted from with a vfat driver for disk images.

Ventoy then creates chainload grub commands for every image it finds.

You are presented a list of boot options, just like a normal grub boot.

Selecting an option chainloads a boot from that disk image.

There's devil in the details of course, but largely that's how it's working.

There is a "How Ventoy works" section.

First part is listing there open source dependencies

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_disk_layout.html

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_disk_layout_gpt.html

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_mbr_vs_gpt.html

...

If you mean, technically, I can't help you.

But for users: You install Ventoy on your USB drive, and then you can drop ISO files in a folder. On startup, Ventoy opens and you can choose the ISO to boot.

This means you just have one bootable USB, and no more using tools to create bootable usb drives.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventoy#How_does_Ventoy_work, TLDR when you pick an ISO, it sets up a virtual device which emulates a regular bootable device, pointing to the contents in the ISO.

This section of the wikipedia article is entirely uncited, and reads vaguely like LLM output. Ventoy is not a hypervisor (afaik), so how does it present an emulated device to a chainloaded OS?

This is the edit that introduced that section, originally titled "How does Ventroy works" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ventoy&diff=12247...

What I need is a way to reboot into a ramdisk version of my OS. This would allow me to do things like repartition the disk on which my root folder is stored (among other things).

You can do this without rebooting. Just copy the filesystem into ram and switch_root.

Filesystem is too big for the ram.

> No need to update Ventoy when a new distro is released

> Most types of OS supported, 1200+ iso files tested ... 90%+ distros in distrowatch.com supported

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