My job involves testing a lot of tools, and many of them only come as ISOs. That usually means flashing each one to a USB drive before I can boot from it. Except I haven’t done that in years, not even for the rescue USB I carry to fix broken Windows PCs.
Instead, I use Ventoy. It’s a free, open-source tool that lets you keep as many ISOs as you want on one USB drive, without reformatting or rewriting it every time you want to try a new OS. All you do is drop the ISO onto the drive, and it shows up in the boot menu next time.
Ventoy makes life with ISOs so much better
One drive, any ISO, zero reflashing
For years, Rufus was my go-to tool for bootable media. It’s fast and reliable, but it has a flaw that I didn’t notice until I found Ventoy. It writes a single ISO to the drive and wipes everything else. Now, if I want to test another ISO, I would need to open Rufus, pick the new ISO, wait for it to finish, and the old one is deleted during the process.
Ventoy (GitHub) is the solution I found. Instead of writing the ISO to the drive sector by sector, it installs a small bootloader once. After that, the ISO file stays a regular file, so you can drag and drop as many ISOs as you want onto the drive. When you boot, Ventoy scans the drive and shows a menu of every image it finds.
This way, I can keep multiple ISOs for multiple operating systems, including Windows 11, Ubuntu, Fedora, and a couple of rescue tools, on the same stick. If a new release is available, all I do is replace the old one with the latest version, and that’s it.
More importantly, the storage drive is still usable for regular file transfer or storage. Useful if you have a USB drive with large capacity and don’t want to be stuck on either using it as rescue media or a regular storage device.
A one-time setup that takes a few minutes
Before you start, back up anything on your USB drive. Installing Ventoy erases it entirely, as Rufus does.
Download Ventoy, extract the ZIP file, and run Ventoy2Disk.exe. Pick your USB drive from the Device dropdown and make sure the correct drive is selected. You don’t want to wipe the wrong drive, so take your time. Once confirmed, click Install, then confirm both warning prompts.
Ventoy creates two partitions. The large one is for your ISOs and files, and it uses exFAT by default. That’s why large Windows 11 ISOs over 4GB copy without any workarounds. The second is a small, roughly 32MB partition that holds the bootloader.
Once it’s done, open the new Ventoy drive in File Explorer and copy your ISOs onto it like any other file. You can also sort them into folders, since Ventoy scans them all. When a new version of Ventoy comes out, run Ventoy2Disk again and click Update instead of Install. Your ISOs stay where they are.
Booting from a Ventoy drive into a live session
Pick an ISO from the menu and go
A live session runs a whole operating system straight from the USB stick. Nothing gets installed on your computer, and your Windows files stay untouched. When you shut down, the PC boots back into its normal OS.
To boot, restart your PC with the drive plugged in and keep tapping its boot menu key as the logo appears. It’s usually F12, F11, F10, F9, or Esc, depending on the maker. On my HP laptop, Esc opens a Startup Menu, and F9 brings up the boot device list. Select your USB drive. It might show up by its brand name or as “UEFI: USB.”
Ventoy’s blue menu then lists every ISO on the drive. Select one, like Ubuntu, and press Enter. Ventoy asks how to boot it. Choose Boot in normal mode, which works for most ISOs. Boot in grub2 mode is a fallback for distros that refuse to start the normal way.
If Secure Boot is on, your first boot on each PC opens a blue Perform MOK management screen. Choose Enroll key from disk, open the VTOYEFI partition, select ENROLL_THIS_KEY_IN_MOKMANAGER.cer, then choose Continue and Yes, and reboot. You only do this once per PC. If you update from a Ventoy version older than 1.1.14, you’ll have to enroll the new key again.
The Persistence plugin
Pick up where you left off
A live session is lost once you close the session. The ISO is read-only, so every file, setting, and app you install lives in RAM, which is lost when you shut down the PC.
Now, if you don’t want to lose your live sessions, you can use the Persistence plugin. It works by giving the live OS a separate file on the USB drive to save its changes to.
First, download images.zip from the Assets section of Ventoy’s GitHub releases page. Inside are persistence images in different sizes. Pick carefully, because the size you choose is all the space you get for saved changes. The file name also has to match what your distro expects. Ubuntu-based distros look for a casper-rw label, so I used persistence_ext4_4GB_casper-rw.dat. Create a folder called persistence on the Ventoy drive, extract the image, and put the .dat file inside.
Next, Ventoy needs to know which image goes with which ISO. Run VentoyPlugson.exe from the Ventoy folder, select your drive, and click Start. A settings page opens in your browser. Go to Persistence Plugin, click Add, and enter the paths to your ISO and .dat file. Save it, then click Stop in the Plugson window. Now, when you pick that ISO, you’ll see a Boot with persistence option.
A few things to keep in mind. The .dat file isn’t encrypted, so anyone who picks up your drive can read it. Always shut down properly, because pulling the drive mid-session can corrupt the file. Every write also goes straight to the USB, so a slow drive can make the whole session sluggish. Each ISO also needs its own .dat file and entry if you want it to remember your changes.
Ventoy makes it easy to work with ISOs
Ventoy is not perfect, as occasionally you might come across an ISO that it can’t boot. Tails OS is probably the first ISO where I needed to use a different media maker. It had boot problems with Ventoy for years, and while Ventoy 1.1.06 fixed boot issues with Tails 6.13 and above, the Tails team doesn’t support running it this way. Its encrypted Persistent Storage expects a USB made with Tails’ own install method, and a privacy-focused OS is the last place I’d want to add an extra layer I can’t vouch for. Some people have also raised concerns about binary blobs in Ventoy’s code, which matters more in security-sensitive setups than on a home test bench.
So I keep Rufus around. When I need a single-purpose drive that has to boot exactly as its makers intended, flashing still makes sense. For everything else, from testing distros to building a portable PC diagnostic USB, Ventoy makes it easy to carry multiple ISOs in one single USB drive.