As many of you will have noticed, I like to mess about
with various bits of hardware and software on this channel,
and when I'm testing something like this, I need to
install a whole bunch of different operating systems.
Now, I could just have a drawer full of
installation media; but let's be honest, that would suck.
Instead, I have this.
This one USB drive can install any operating system
I need, or boot me into various bare metal utilities.
Stick around and I'll show you how to make your own.
To get started, you're going to need the following:
One regular USB drive.
What size?
Well, it depends how many installers and utilities you want to put on it.
You'll need the installers or image files for
your operating systems and bootable utilities.
A DVD image ISO file will do, as will an IMG file, a
Windows WIM image, EFI, or a Windows Hyper-V Virtual Disk.
That's a VHD or VHDX.
In most cases, you can go to the vendor's
website, download a DVD image and use that.
They're usually free to download, even from Microsoft.
Shout in the comments if you're struggling to find
something and someone might be able to help you out with a link.
The last thing you'll need is a little tool called Ventoy.
This is also free.
In fact, it's open source; so free as in beer and free as in speech.
Go to Ventoy.net, click downloads and choose
the one that matches your operating system.
This is the operating system you're going to use to prepare the drive.
I'm going to use Windows to set things up, so I'll download the Windows version,
even though I'll use the drive to boot Linux.
At the time of recording, it doesn't actually matter which link you click here
because they all just take you to GitHub.
So scroll down to the assets section under the latest release and click on the
appropriate link for your operating system to get the actual download.
Extract the zip file you downloaded and the file you want to run is Ventoy2Disk.
Make sure your USB drive is plugged in and you
should be able to select it from the dropdown.
Be careful at this point. Ventoy is going to
format your USB drive, destroying any files on it.
Make sure you've selected the correct drive
and that there's nothing on it you want to keep.
Click "Install" to install Ventoy onto your drive. It doesn't take very long.
Once it's finished, you'll have an empty USB drive called "Ventoy" showing up.
If you look closely at the disk partitioning,
you'll see it has a second partition called VTOYEFI.
When you reinsert the drive later on, you
might find that appears as an additional drive.
If it happens, you can just ignore it. Don't mess about with the VTOYEFI
partition. That's where Ventoy itself is installed.
If you want to update to a newer version of Ventoy in the future, just download the
newer version, run Ventoy2Disk, and use the "Update" button.
That will update the version of Ventoy installed in your VTOYEFI partition without
affecting any of your files on the drive.
At this point, the drive acts like any other USB drive and we can use it as such.
The magic happens when we add bootable images to it.
I'll download a fresh copy of Ubuntu Desktop and Windows 11 as an example.
In both cases, I'm downloading an ISO file. To add these to Ventoy, all I need to
do is drag and drop them onto the USB drive, just like any regular file.
Now, if I reboot my computer and choose to boot from the USB drive, Ventoy will
load and present me with a list of images to boot from.
In this case, we've got our Ubuntu and Windows ISOs.
If you don't know how to boot from a USB
drive, refer to computer or motherboard's manual.
There's usually a button you need to press as it
starts up, or you can change the boot order in your BIOS.
If you're using Windows, you can hold the shift key and
restart. This will present you with an options screen.
Choose "Use a device", then choose the option that represents your USB drive.
This may say something like USB storage, removable
storage or the device model. Then you'll reboot into Ventoy.
From the Ventoy menu, I can see the images copied to the drive, and I can boot into
the Windows 11 setup by selecting the image I downloaded from Microsoft.
One snag you might run into is Secure Boot. Ventoy
supports Secure Boot, but it isn't trusted by default.
This doesn't mean Ventoy isn't trustworthy, it just
means your computer doesn't know it's trustworthy… yet.
When your computer starts and has Secure Boot
enabled, it looks for a signature from a trusted party.
Most computers and motherboards ship pre-configured to trust Microsoft, because
most computers come with Windows installed.
In fact, a lot of Linux distros get their bootcode signed by Microsoft, because
it's the easiest way to avoid end users having to deal with this screen.
It is fairly easy to deal with, though.
Hit OK, then press any key to manage keys,
and at the next screen, select "Enroll key from disk".
Select VTOYEFI, then ENROLL_THIS_KEY_IN_MOKMANAGER.cer,
"Continue", and "Yes", then "Reboot".
If this seems confusing, what you've just done is you've added Ventoy to the list
of trusted parties that your computer knows about.
Ventoy's certificate is now stored alongside Microsoft's, so when your computer
sees bootcode signed by Ventoy, it will allow it to
run and you should have no further problems with it.
Ventoy is perfectly usable as it stands.
You can add or remove images from it by dragging and dropping the files, and you
can even use it as a regular USB drive to transfer files between computers;
but the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed
that my version looked a little bit different.
Let me show you how to customise it.
You can write a config file by hand (it uses JSON) but the easiest option is to
run the VentoPlugson application included in the download.
Select your drive, click "Start", and it will open a web page.
There is a ton of customisation available.
One of the options I changed was this secondary boot menu.
When I selected the Windows image with Ventoy at
defaults, there was the second menu with additional boot options.
If you don't care about that, you can set this
option to 0 for "Don't display" and it will be skipped.
Another more obvious thing I changed was the
visual theme from the "Theme Plugin" section of the menu.
Ventoy uses GRUB as the bootloader, which is skinnable.
Click here to get the documentation page, and there's a
link right here to a list of pre-made themes for GRUB.
If I look at the Distro Grub Themes, for example, we can see a different style with
variations for different operating system distributions.
There's one for Ventoy, although you can actually use any
as the difference is just the graphic displayed at the top.
I'll turn on the Ventoy one, though.
If, like me, you're using Windows, this TAR file might throw you.
Long story short, treat it like a ZIP file.
You'll need something to extract it as Windows won't handle it by default.
I recommend 7-Zip because it's free, it's open source (where licensing allows), and
it can handle a ton of different types of archive.
But if you don't want to use a third-party tool, you
can extract it natively in Windows using the command line.
The command is tar -xf and the path to the
file to extract it in the current directory.
If you go back to your Ventoy drive, you'll see there's now a folder called Ventoy
and a config file in there which has been created to save for customisations.
I'll drag the folder containing my extracted GRUB theme into here and rename it to
"MyTheme", just so it's a bit more obvious what it is.
Back in the configuration tool, from the "Theme Plugin"
section I'll click "Add" and give it the path to my theme.txt file.
In my case, that's F:\Ventoy\MyTheme\theme.txt.
You can change the default screen resolution here
as well if you prefer it to be a bit more high-res.
One other difference you might have spotted in my version was it gave a list of
operating systems by name rather than listing file names.
That was done using the "Menu Alias" plugin.
From here you can override the menu text for specific
files to have it display something a bit more friendly.
Let me add aliases for our Windows and Ubuntu images.
Ok, I'll stop and exit the Plugson tool, and if I reboot now you'll see Ventoy is
using the theme we downloaded and the menu items have been replaced by our aliases.
If I select Ubuntu it's skipping the second stage menu and booting me straight into
Ubuntu, which I can run live from USB or install to my hard drive.
Have a play around with the different options and have fun building your own
ultimate USB drive loaded with your favorite
installers, live boot images, or recovery utilities.
Back when I did more in the field computer repair sort of work, I kept a drive like
this in my car at all times, with a bunch of
recovery utilities and a live Linux install on it.
I cannot tell you how many times that drive saved someone's bacon.
Back then there was no Ventoy.
And building something like this manually was an exercise in frustration to try and
get all of the tools to play nicely together with GRUB.
The fact that you can just drag and drop DVD and
boot images straight onto a drive now and you're done?
I would have happily paid money for this
back in the day and now you can get it for free.
To see more free tools, click on this video here and I'll introduce you to a few
more little lifesavers that no tech or sysadmin should be without.
Now go click that like button and I'll see you in the next video.