Stop Reflashing USBs: Build a Ventoy Toolkit

This video is part of my series of videos showing you tools, utilities, and gadgets that I think you should look at getting. Some of these will be free, paid, but all of these tools, utilities, and gadgets are things that I have found really useful myself. In today's video, we're going to look at a free and open-source utility that I think will save you a lot of time. It's really useful when you want to install operating systems on new devices or dual boot devices, etc. I have downloaded the software and installed it on this USB flash drive or memory stick, and I'll plug it into this

laptop, and I'll turn the laptop on. Now, what I'm going to do when the laptop boots is press F7 on this laptop to allow me to select the device to boot off. So, in this example, I have Ubuntu ready installed on this laptop as well as Windows, but what I'm going to do is get it to boot off this USB flash drive. And notice here, Ventoy allows me to specify a whole bunch of ISO images that I can use to install on this device. So, [snorts] rather than using Rufus or Etcher to download an ISO and write it to a USB flash drive, in other words, have multiple flash drives for different operating systems, you can have a whole bunch of ISOs copied into a single flash drive, and you can install any one of these operating systems. So, as an example, I'll just select Linux Mint. I can either use normal boot mode, which should work fine, but if you have errors, you can boot using Grub 2. So, I'll just use normal boot mode, and notice here, I can now start the installation of Linux Mint on this computer. So, if I want to dual boot between Linux Mint and Windows, I can install Linux Mint on this laptop as if I'd flashed the image using Rufus or Etcher. There's no need to use that software, you can use Ventoy to do the installation. But let's say, okay, I'm I don't want to use that. I want to use a different operating system. So, all I need to do again is reboot the laptop. And now I could say, okay, let's do the same thing. I'm going to boot off the USB flash drive. But now, in this case, I'm going to install, let's say, Ubuntu or Pop! _OS or Windows or something else, such as Zorin OS, etc. I have copied a whole bunch of ISO images on to this single USB flash drive, and now I can simply install any one of these operating systems onto this laptop. There are many advantages here.

One of the advantages is that I don't need to have a single USB flash drive or memory stick for every operating system. I don't have to download images and then write them to a flash drive using Etcher or Rufus. I can simply copy ISO images onto this memory stick, and then install any one of those operating systems as if I had an external CD-ROM or had written the image to a flash drive. Now, you don't have to use a memory stick, you could use an external SSD as an example, which will allow you to write and read much quicker, and obviously gives you a huge amount of capacity. So, you could use either of these as an example. With a Ventoy, I can now install Ubuntu. I won't do that, however, I'll simply reboot, and let's boot into Windows so that I can show you how I do install and set up Ventoy. It has got other advantages, which I'll also show you. Okay, so I've booted into Windows now. Another advantage is this is simply a USB drive. So, notice a Ventoy over there. I have copied all of these ISOs into the root directory, and I could install any one of those. But what I've also got here is additional software like hypervisors or OVAs and other software that I can use using this USB drive. So, rather than having a single memory stick for every single operating system, and then having to store software such as the VMware hypervisor or VirtualBox or drivers for computers, any important software that you want to keep on a separate drive, you can put all of this on a single drive. Now, obviously, you don't want to have everything on a single drive, you want to make backups, so you'll have more than one of these, but the idea here is that you can have multiple operating systems directly on this. So, all you have to do, if you download a new ISO as an example, so let's take elementary here, is copy that onto the drive. So, I'll simply paste it there. And that will now become available when I boot off the USB memory stick or USB flash drive, if you prefer. One of the reasons you might not want to use a memory stick like this is notice how slow the speeds are. You may want to use something like this that's a lot quicker. But it's as simple as that to add ISOs to Ventoy. Okay, I'll cancel this just to save time, and then what I'll do is eject this. But before I do that, notice this partition is the partition that it uses to boot off. So, single USB memory stick or flash drive, this is the partition where I dump all my ISO images or other software, and I can boot off this as well. So, what I'll do here is eject this, and then let's write a new version to this memory stick. So, to download the software, I'm

going to open up a browser. Can use whichever browser you prefer. You could go to GitHub, where they talk about the software and talk about the fact that it's a open-source tool to create bootable USB drives for various files. With Ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, just copy the image files to the USB drive and then boot from them. You can copy many images at a time, and Ventoy will give you a boot menu, and I've shown you that already. But to download the software, you need to go to ventoy. net. So, go to that website. We're going to go to downloads, and we're going to download the software for whichever operating system we're using. I'm using Windows in this example. I get a lot of hate sometimes about using Windows. I'm just doing it this way because a lot of people use Windows. And I'm going to download the latest version from SourceForge. So, the software will download in a moment. So, it's now downloading. On my downloads directory, I can see the zip file, so what I'll do is extract the zip file and just extract all of those files into a directory, and there you go. And within that, you simply need to run this executable file. So, Ventoy2Disk. exe. So, I'm going to double-click on that. Now, as always with this type of thing, you use the software at your own risk. Notice it says here that this is an unknown publisher. Do you want to allow it to make changes? I'm going to say yes. This is open-source software, so you can go and look at it on GitHub if you like. Have a look at what people are saying. It's not just me saying that this is great software, many, many people will tell you that this software is fantastic. But notice all we need to do now is select the drive that we're going to write the software to. Be aware that it's going to wipe the drive, so make sure that you select the correct drive. So, in this case, it's my SanDisk 128 gig, and then you simply click install to install it. Now, it's telling me that data will be lost because there's something on that already. I'm okay with that, I'm going to say okay. I'm going to say yes to delete it, yes again because I really am okay with wiping this. The authors really made sure that you really, really want to wipe that drive. As you can see there, it's writing. And there you go. As simple as that to create the Ventoy USB drive. So, on my PC now, notice I see Ventoy here. So, E drive. And all I need to do, literally, is go to my images that I want to install. So, I'll take something like Mint again, copy that, go to my drive, and literally paste it into that drive. That's all you have to do, and that will become available. I'll take one more image just to show you what the menu looks like. Go to this drive, and paste the ISO image. So, it's going to take a while. Drive's a bit slow, but all you need to do now is wait for those files to copy, and then you can boot off the drive, and then install whichever operating system you want to. Now, as I demonstrated, it doesn't have to be Linux ISOs, it could be Windows ISOs. So, whichever ISOs you want, you can simply download them and then copy them. So, if I was trying to get a Windows ISO, I would simply look for Windows 11 ISO download as an example. That takes me to the Microsoft website. So, microsoft. com. Here's the URL. I'm going to download Windows 11. Scrolling down, I don't want to use the assistant, I simply want to scroll all the way down. I want to get the ISO for X64, not ARM. The ARM ISOs are also available there. You simply click confirm, and then you can specify your language, so I'll say United States, and I'll confirm, and that will now allow me to download that ISO. So, I'll just say save, and as you can see there, the ISO is downloading. Now, that's going to take a while, so we won't wait for that. The point is that any ISOs that you've got downloaded, Linux ISOs, Windows ISOs, anything can be copied to that directory, and will be available for you to use when you boot off the USB memory stick. Okay, so those images have now been copied, so let's reboot the computer. So, I'll restart it. I'm going to press the special key on this computer to allow me to select the device to boot from. Now, the keys that you use to decide whether you boot into BIOS and then select the device that you boot from or doing what I've done here will depend on your laptop. On this specific laptop, I can just use F7 and then choose the device to boot from. Okay, so back on here, I can select SanDisk. And if I press enter, notice in this version, not my previous one, I've only got those two operating systems that I previously copied across. So, if I select Pop! _OS and then do a normal boot, notice it says something's gone wrong. So, let's try GRUB boot and see if that works or perhaps there's something wrong with the ISO image. Okay, so I'll go back to booting off the SanDisk. I'll select Pop! _OS and let's try GRUB2 mode. And [snorts] then notice here we have the option to try or install Pop! _OS. And there you go, I've now booted into Pop! _OS and I can decide if I want to install Pop! _OS on this computer or not. Now, you may encounter issues when using

secure boot. So, what I've got here is another laptop. I'll turn it on and I'll press F2 on this laptop to get it to boot into BIOS. And on the save and exit settings, I'll tell it to boot off the SanDisk. So, when I press enter now, notice we have this error. It's complaining about the keys. So, it says security failed, security violation. I'll press enter. So, I'm going to enroll the key from disk. I'm going to specify my Ventoy EFI to press enter. I'm going to go down to enroll this key, press enter, go to continue, press enter. I'm going to say yes to enroll the keys and then all I need to do is reboot now. When the computer reboots, I'm going to press F2, go back into BIOS and then boot off the SanDisk. And notice now we have our Ventoy displayed and we can specify which operating system we want to install. And I'm going to select Pop! _OS in this example. It's giving me the same problem as our previous one, so we would have to go back and use GRUB install. So, back

in the BIOS, select our SanDisk. I'll use Pop! _OS again and let's do a GRUB install. And notice now I can look at installing Pop! _OS on this other laptop that's using secure boot. So, Ventoy is

fantastic, highly recommend that you look at using it. It's free, it's open source, really useful software to use. I've put some links below if you want to download it and use it, but let me know in the comments, have you been using it for a long time? Do you find it useful? What are your thoughts about Ventoy or have you found other software that does a better job? Let me know. Otherwise, I'm David Bombal and want to wish you all the very best.