I keep a portable PC diagnostic USB with the necessary tools and often prefer Rufus for its stability. However, the challenge with Rufus is that you need to keep reformatting USB sticks when you want to switch an OS, which is not ideal if you want to carry a multiboot USB installer.
Ventoy is a free and open-source tool that can turn any USB into a multiboot device. Once configured, you can drag and drop ISO files onto the drive, and all of them will be available via a boot menu. More importantly, you can continue to use your USB drive as a regular media storage device.
Why I use Ventoy?
One install, and the stick stops being a single-use drive
Before Ventoy, I used Rufus. So, I’d download an image file from Microsoft or a Linux project’s site, open a tool like Rufus, pick the ISO, and wait while it wrote the drive. Then I’d do it again for the next operating system.
Ventoy offers a write-once, use-forever setup. You install it on the drive once, and after that the ISO file itself is the installer. You can copy it over like any other file, and it shows up in a menu the next time you boot from the stick. The project is open source, the code is on GitHub, and there are separate builds for Windows and Linux. It handles ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x), and EFI files, so Windows installers, Linux distros, and rescue images all sit side by side.
Setting up the drive takes about five minutes
Head to the Ventoy website and open the download page. Pick the build for your operating system. The Windows download hands you a zip archive, so right-click it and choose Extract all once it lands.
Inside the extracted folder, run Ventoy2Disk.exe. Windows may throw a protection warning because the app isn’t a widely recognized signed application, which is normal for open-source tools like this one. Click More info and then Run anyway to continue.
Now select your USB drive from the list. This is the step to slow down on, because installing Ventoy erases everything on the target disk. Back up your files first, and double-check the drive letter and size before you go further. If your stick doesn’t appear at all, an app like DiskGenius or Intel’s Driver and Support Assistant may be holding onto it in the background. Close those and refresh the list.
Open the Option menu if you want to change the partition style or turn Secure Boot Support on or off, then click Install and confirm the two warnings. Ventoy writes two partitions to the drive: a small 32MB one called VTOYEFI that holds the bootloader, and a large data partition for everything else. When it finishes, the version number appears next to your drive in the tool, and Windows shows the stick as a plain, ordinary drive in File Explorer.
Add ISOs and boot from it
Copy the file, restart, and pick from the menu
Once the media is ready, you can drag an ISO onto the large partition, and you’re done. I keep mine in folders named Windows, Linux, and Tools, which works because Ventoy searches every folder and subfolder on that partition and lists what it finds.
You can pile on as many images as the drive holds. I’ve had a Windows 11 installer, two Linux distros, and a rescue environment on the same stick at once.
To use them, restart the PC with the stick plugged in and choose it from your firmware’s boot menu. Instead of jumping straight into one installer, Ventoy shows a list of every image on the drive. Scroll with the arrow keys, hit Enter, and pick Boot in normal mode. I ran Zorin OS this way to see what the desktop felt like, rebooted, and picked a different distro from the same menu a minute later.
Two smaller things I picked up along the way. If you drop a file named .ventoyignore into a folder, Ventoy skips that folder and everything under it, which keeps your storage files out of the boot menu. And if the drive is loaded with thousands of files, the menu can stall on a message about scanning files, so it’s worth keeping your ISOs in a few tidy folders rather than scattered everywhere.
Not everything works with Ventoy
Secure Boot, stubborn ISOs, and the things drag and drop won’t fix
In theory, I should be able to run everything via Ventoy, but it doesn’t work with everything, and Secure Boot was the first wall I hit. Ventoy supports it, and the option is enabled by default in recent versions, but the first time you boot the drive on a computer, you get a blue key management screen where you have to enroll Ventoy’s key. Some machines also need the Allow Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA option turned on in the firmware before the drive will start at all, and newer Ventoy releases ask you to enroll an extra key because of a 2023 change to Microsoft’s signing certificate.
Ventoy’s default policy bypasses Secure Boot checks for the images it loads, and the key you enroll lives in your motherboard’s firmware until you remove it.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that not every image boots. Ventoy tests hundreds of ISOs, but the ones it can’t handle tend to be older or unusual. ReactOS refused to run from my drive, and I had to fall back to a virtual machine to try it. Old Windows 7 media often stops with a message about no installation media found, which usually comes down to missing USB 3.0 drivers inside the ISO rather than anything Ventoy did wrong.
A few tasks also need more than dragging a file. Persistence, where a live Linux session keeps your changes between reboots, needs a plugin and a configuration file placed in a specific folder. And if the boot menu never appears and you land in a plain command prompt, the usual suspects are a fake or failing USB stick, or an older BIOS that can’t read past a certain point on the drive.
- OS
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Windows, Linux
- Developer
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Hailong Sun
Ventoy is an open-source utility for creating bootable USB drives. It allows you to simply copy ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x), or EFI files directly to the drive, eliminating the need to reformat for each new OS installation
One app, one USB drive, and many uses
Even with tens of utilities and ISOs, the USB drive continues to work as a regular media storage device. The same stick holding a Windows installer and a rescue environment also carries the documents I move between my laptop and my desktop.
Ventoy doesn’t do anything clever beyond that. It’s a boot menu for files you already have, and it asks for one setup and then gets out of the way. All it does is save you from the hassle of reformatting each time you want to install a new tool and does it well.