In today's video, I'm going to be talking about a game-changing piece of software that
you guys actually told me about.
In a previous video, I was talking about four different bootable USB drives that everyone
should make.
They can act as rescue drives in case your computer doesn't boot or something like that
and you have to fix it.
In that video, I mentioned that you would need four different USB drives, one for each
of the disks.
However, in the comments, a lot of you told me about a program called Ventoy, which basically
allows you to really easily create a multi bootable USB stick, where it allows you to
boot from any ISOs or bootable images you put into it.
It's really easy.
You literally drag and drop the ISOs into it and then it allows you to put from them.
It's even open source, so that adds another level of credibility and trust to it.
In this video, I'm going to show you how it works and how to set it up and why I think
it's so cool.
Make sure you follow along, because there are a couple of steps that might be confusing,
specifically around the secure boot feature that a lot of computers have.
You have to specially set up this USB boot disk if you want that to work with your computer.
So make sure you follow the steps.
But it's really not that hard.
You just have to follow along.
Before I walk you through how to set it up, I do want to give a shout out to my Instagram
account.
If you haven't seen it yet, it's just @thiojoe on Instagram.
Be careful if you have any kind of medical condition, because you may die of laughing
so hard over there.
I usually post either funny tech names, usually as stories or posts, as well as just cool
stuff in general.
So check that out just @thiojoe over an Instagram.
Hope to see over there.
So with that being said, we can move on.
All right.
To get started, you're just going to need one USB drive, the bigger, the better, though
because that way you can store more bootable ISOs on it.
I would recommend probably about 64 gigabytes or more.
By the way, USB drives are dirt cheap these days.
The one I got and I would recommend is probably the Samsung BAR Plus thumb drive.
You can get it on Amazon these days for literally $12 for a 64 gigabyte one.
It's a good one, too, like 3.1 USB.
It's really good speeds.
Some testing I've seen shows it has really good durability and write speeds and stuff
like that.
It's actually a good one for 12 bucks.
How can you beat that?
Or if you want to go hogwild crazy, you can spend a whopping $22 and get a 128 gigabytes.
I'll put the link to that for Amazon in the description, if you want to check that one
out.
Anyway, once you pick out a thumb drive, make sure it's empty and you're not using it for
anything else, because it will be wiped.
You just download the installer for Ventoy, either from their website, Ventoy.net, or
the get hub releases page for the project.
I'll put the links to that in the description, as well.
Then once it's downloaded, you simply run the Ventoy2Disk.exe set-up file.
When you run it, you'll see this.
Just make sure you double check the drive letter and the device you're selecting, because
anything you do select will be completely wiped, so remember that.
Here's a really important thing not to forget, though, is go up to options and then click
secure boot support.
Now, when you click the dropdown, it'll show it as checked.
Also, next to the version name of Ventoy, lower in the window, it'll show that little
lock to show that it's been enabled.
The reason this is important is because most computers have what is called secure boot.
It's a feature in the BIOS that basically only allows drives and disks and stuff like
that to run if it's been signed in a certain way.
Ventoy, I guess, because it's running multiple things, it's signed by itself.
So you have to manually tell the BIOS to allow this to be run.
Or you would have to just disable secure boot altogether in the BIOS, which is probably
not recommended, but you just have to do a couple more steps.
It's actually easy.
I'll show you how to do it later, but just be aware that if you don't check secure boot
support and you try to run it, it'll just not run.
For the partition style, just keep it as MBR, Master Boot Record.
If your computer doesn't like it for some reason, you can always change it to GPT later.
Then you just click install.
It's going to format the drive, wipe everything on it and create a couple different partitions.
One is going to be the boot partition that the BIOS is going to use to boot off.
That's going to be hidden.
Then there's going to be the bigger data partition where you're going to copy the ISOs onto it.
When it's done, you'll see the Ventoy name for the USB.
Now, that's the big partition you're going to use.
By the way, you can also rename that.
It doesn't have to be called Ventoy.
Also, once it's done, you'll now see that on the right-hand side it'll show what version
of Ventoy is on the USB drive as well as the little lock to show that the support for security
was added.
Oh, and if you want to update with a more recent version of Ventoy, literally all you
have to do is run the program again with the newer one and click update.
Then it'll overwrite the old program, but actually keep everything in the data partition.
So it's not like you have to recopy everything over it.
Then once you install it, you literally just have to copy the image or ISO files, whatever,
into that disk and those will show up as bootable when you boot to the Ventoy disk on your computer.
You just select from whatever ones.
It also supports several other types, such as image files, IMG, WIM, that's Windows image
or something like that.
And even virtual hard drive files, VHD.
It supports a lot.
It's really easy.
Just copy it over.
And to boot it, literally, just when you're booting up the computer, you have to get to
however your computer lets you select the bootable device.
Sometimes there's just a key you have to keep pressing.
Or at least there's almost always a way to do it from the BIOS.
Just look up how to get to the BIOS from your specific computer model.
Then you can usually boot to whatever device you want.
Also, if you see two partitions listed, I believe the second one is the one you have
to select.
If it doesn't, you can just try it.
But in my case, the second one is the one and you have to choose.
Now, like I mentioned, secure boot is probably going to be enabled on your computer.
It's not a problem.
It just means the first time you boot to Ventoy on that computer, you have to basically add
a key to it so the computer will allow it.
The first time you do boot to the Ventoy USB, you'll probably see a blue window come up
that looks like this.
It might say access denied or an error or something.
This is okay.
It's really easy to fix.
However, if you try to boot to the USB and nothing happens, or the computer just restarts,
that might mean you forgot to enable secure boot support.
That's at least what I experienced.
So just double check that.
In this menu, the Ventoy website has a list of steps to follow.
All you have to do is basically press enter a couple of times.
When you get to the window about enrolling the key, just select enroll key from disk,
then the next one you'll see several options and you select the one that either says EFI
or VTOYEFI.
Then in the next one, you'll choose the option that says, "Enroll this key in Mockmanager."
Then you hit continue, and then yes, enroll the key and then reboot.
And now, it should work.
This is what you'll see in the Ventoy boot screen.
You'll see literally a list of the image or ISO files that you copied in before.
There are a couple options such as memdisk mode, which loads the whole ISO into memory
or something before booting.
If you have some issues, that might be something to try.
Also, if you want, you could organize the ISOs into different folders.
In that case, if you select tree mode, that'll basically let you see the different directory
structure and show the folders, not just all of them listed at once.
The option for local boot, just boots to the regular hard drive.
Then the tools option is stuff like keyboard layout, screen display mode, some plugins
you may have added, stuff like that.
To boot to any of these images, you literally just highlight it and select it.
And that's it.
It'll boot to it just like as if you had put it on its own USB drive.
So it's dead simple.
There's not much to it, but just super useful.
And cool.
Now, one thing I'll point out is you might think the menu looks kind of ugly, but it
does support themes.
Ventoy uses the GRUB boot loader, which is also used by a lot of Linux distributions.
There are many themes out there for that, so it does support those.
There is one website, gnome-look.org, and they have a page for GRUB themes.
On the right hand side, you can literally see a list of the most popular ones that probably
look the best.
Actually, the top one called BigSur GRUB theme makes it even easier, because they have a
pre-made Ventoy version, so you just download the Ventoy version from the site.
It is a TAR file, so you'll need like 7-Zip or WinRAR to open it.
But then you literally just copy the Ventoy folder into the main directory of the USB
drive, along with all the other ISOs.
Now, when you boot up the USB, it'll look a lot prettier.
Most of the other themes, unfortunately, don't have a pre-made Ventoy download.
You'll just have to do it yourself, which is an extra step.
So basically just create that Ventoy folder in the top level of the USB drive.
It is case sensitive, so no capitals.
Then in that folder, you can create another themes folder.
And in there, just put the folder with the downloaded theme in it.
The only tricky part, which isn't really that tricky, because you just copy and paste it,
is you have to create a Ventoy.json file and then put in this JSON code and just edit it
to tell it where the actual theme.text file is.
So just change the name of the theme basically in that file path.
I'll put that code in the description, so you can literally just copy and paste it into
the file.
If you want to customize it even more, you can just download one of the themes, use it
basically as a template.
Then open up something like the background.png file in Photoshop and edit it to look however
you want.
Just make sure you keep it at the same resolution.
Ventoy does have a lot of other plugins that are optional, but they seem to be pretty specialized,
a bit technical and they do require further editing to the JSON file.
I'm not really going to get into those.
Really just the main feature is kind of the main point.
You can see some of the examples of the ISOs I've put in here so far.
I have memtest86, which is good for testing the memory or the RAM or whatever.
The Ubuntu live disk is in there.
There's also the Windows PE installation that I showed you how to make in another video,
along with a couple antivirus bootable disks.
I don't know, they're kind of old, so they might not work, but I figured why not?
I also threw in the Windows 10 installation media, because that could come in handy, along
with Hiren Boot CD, which I mentioned several times.
Basically, it's a bootable disk that has a ton of tools in there that can be used for
everything from disk recovery to fixing stuff when Windows won't boot.
It does look like Windows, because it runs on a lightweight version, Windows PE.
So really cool one.
Useful to have.
So not much more to it.
It's just a really useful program.
Simple to set up.
If you guys do want to keep watching, the next one I would recommend at this point is
that one where I talk about four different bootable USB drives everyone should make.
Now, you can watch that and it's even easier to set them up.
You just copy the files onto Ventoy.
Let me know what you guys think down in the comments, if you've found this extremely useful.
Also, give it a like and be sure to subscribe.
Also, click the bell if you don't want to miss any new videos, which is bound to happen
if you subscribe to a lot of people like me.
So anyway, thanks so much for watching, guys.
I'll see you in the next video.