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284 points wilsonfiifi | 26 comments | | HN request time: 1.44s | source | bottom
1. fumeux_fume ◴[] No.45760825[source]
The nice thing about Ventoy—and I didn’t fully appreciate this until I used it—is how simple it makes bootable USBs. You just drag and drop ISO images onto the drive, and it can hold as many as will fit. When you boot from the Ventoy USB, you just pick the image you want to install or run—no re-flashing, no fuss.

It’s honestly wild how convenient it is. Ventoy was the only method that worked for me when I needed to install Windows alongside an existing Linux setup for dual-booting. Everything else I tried failed, but Ventoy handled it perfectly.

replies(5): >>45761417 #>>45761761 #>>45762484 #>>45763103 #>>45763708 #
2. nutjob2 ◴[] No.45761417[source]
Notably Ventoy doesn't work with some Windows install ISOs.
replies(3): >>45761874 #>>45762410 #>>45762593 #
3. Keyframe ◴[] No.45761761[source]
It's truly special. I haven't seen that before. It doesn't work always, with all OS' though, but when it does - it's great.
4. jaderobbins1 ◴[] No.45761874[source]
Any specifics on which windows install ISOs don't work? That way I'll know which ones will need a dedicated USB stick.
replies(1): >>45762238 #
5. CapsAdmin ◴[] No.45762238{3}[source]
Last week I tried to make a bootable usb with windows 11. I tried using dd on macos, and that seemed to work, but the windows installer errored about "not finding drivers for the hdd". This threw me off because I thought something was wrong with the nvme.

Turns out you can't just dd a windows iso onto a usb drive.

You have to format it to fat32, then manually copy all the files. However there is one big installer file which is above 4gb, so you have to get some tool (also provided by Microsoft) to split the file into multiple files less than 4gb. The windows installer will recognize the split files and use those instead.

It's beyond me why the official windows iso just doesn't have this by default...

replies(2): >>45764717 #>>45768072 #
6. guilamu ◴[] No.45762410[source]
Never had this issue.

Tested isos: Windows 10 x64 (Pro, LTSC), Windows 11 (Pro, LTSC). I've installed windows on hundreds of computers with Ventoy and it never failed me.

replies(1): >>45764619 #
7. stavros ◴[] No.45762484[source]
I would love it if it worked well, but it's been really flaky for me. Maybe half the ISOs work, the rest get various errors on boot and fail. These are Linux ISOS, too, which I would have expected to work.

Am I doing something wrong?

replies(5): >>45762567 #>>45762578 #>>45762793 #>>45765949 #>>45771215 #
8. d3Xt3r ◴[] No.45762567[source]
How are you creating your Ventoy drive? I would recommend using GPT. Also be sure to boot your drive in UEFI mode. Finally, be sure to update Ventoy to the latest version, they release regular updates with bugfixes for compatibility issues with various ISOs.
replies(2): >>45762697 #>>45762839 #
9. toast0 ◴[] No.45762578[source]
Probably not, UEFI boot is terribly fussy and I haven't seen any sort of UEFI image loader similar to memdisk that works for BIOS boot. There's an optional standard for loading images, but I don't think any of my firmwares support it; and I'm not sure if the loaded image is available after boot services terminate anyway.

Linux images have to be processed to pull the kernel and initramfs images out, rather than booting an image, and then if the image used a filesystem after boot, hope it finds it. (This is even messier for PXE, at least with USB, you have a fighting chance)

10. d3Xt3r ◴[] No.45762593[source]
You should be able to boot those using the "wimboot" mode.
11. organsnyder ◴[] No.45762697{3}[source]
> I would recommend using GPT

Perhaps this is obvious to many in this context, but this refers to the partitioning scheme for the disk—not the LLM service.

replies(1): >>45763381 #
12. zamadatix ◴[] No.45762793[source]
I don't think I've run into a Linux ISO that hasn't worked. I've done many versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Proxmox, Debian, Gparted, and others without issue across dozens of different machine builds. Same with various versions of Windows or ESXi.

That said, I'm not very sure what you could be doing wrong. Make sure the drive is GPT (not MBR) and isn't starting to fail perhaps. If you've been running into this on a specific machine only it could just be that machine's UEFI is buggy.

replies(1): >>45762854 #
13. stavros ◴[] No.45762839{3}[source]
Hm yeah, I think I used MBR with BIOS. I do upgrade Ventoy regularly, but I think you may be right, I think the issue was with something about the BIOS. I'll try that, thanks!
14. stavros ◴[] No.45762854{3}[source]
I'll try a few things, thanks. I think last time it was Debian that wasn't working, so it's not even anything that out there. I'll try a few things, thanks!
15. Frenchgeek ◴[] No.45763103[source]
It sure make it easy to boot a 64bits OS on a 32bits UEFI machine...
16. bombcar ◴[] No.45763381{4}[source]
ChatMBR.
replies(1): >>45763718 #
17. PaulKeeble ◴[] No.45763708[source]
I used to have a pile of USB drives for this purpose, with various different images on them. I had a windows, linux and memory tester 86 plus and occasionally needed to flash something like clonezilla or gparted. Nowadays I have a fast USB4 capable flash drive which just does all this faster and a whole bunch more ISOs on it and does bios duty too.

One other small advantage is with secure boot you only need to register Ventoy once with a machine and then all the ISOs will boot, whereas with different USB sticks and images each has to be registered individually and some of them don't work with secure boot so you have to turn it off. Just another convenience.

18. munchlax ◴[] No.45763718{5}[source]
I've replaced all my GPT disklabels with Sun disklabels because I refuse to let them talk.

UEFI still boots. Spec said it can boot from fat in an eltorito floppy image and sun disklabels sit in the second or so sector. Spec also said it abstracts the type of volume so all boot methods always work for all drives. ISO images don't use the first 4kB so it doesn't see there's disklabel at all

So now I can mount the ssd as iso9660 but there's also partitions on it of which the third spans the entire drive (of course, because that's the c partition)

replies(1): >>45784886 #
19. nutjob2 ◴[] No.45764619{3}[source]
Lucky you. I'm not sure why it happened to me and not you, but it's a real problem and others have had it too.

It manifests itself as the dreaded "a media driver your computer needs is missing" error message when trying to start the install.

20. nutjob2 ◴[] No.45764717{4}[source]
Don't know why you're being voted down, this was exactly my experience, and from all reports, correct.

But instead of the process you describe (which some tools will do for you) I used Rufus to copy the install files onto a USB formatted as a NTFS partition, working around the 4GB limitation.

replies(1): >>45768657 #
21. estimator7292 ◴[] No.45765949[source]
90% of the time i have failures is because Linux did not correctly finish writing the ISO to disk.

The progress bar that your file manager gives you is an absolute fiction. You must eject the drive through your file manager or run 'sync' in a terminal.

The other 10% is because UEFI decided it hates me today

replies(1): >>45765967 #
22. stavros ◴[] No.45765967{3}[source]
I always eject/sync the drive, but I'll triple check next time, thank you.
23. RulerOf ◴[] No.45768072{4}[source]
You can often format as NTFS and have it work anyway, but it depends on whether or not the system UEFI firmware includes an NTFS driver.

Rufus puts such a driver in its FAT32 boot partition and loads it before starting the winpe.

It drives me nuts that the UEFI sites never included ExFAT.

24. fuzzfactor ◴[] No.45768657{5}[source]
Downvote-a-bots are not capable of actual thinking.

What you sometimes need is a USB stick having a native "geometry" in terms of HDD emulation ability, that will be recognized properly by the particular series of chipset on the target mainboard.

Then the data bits written to a fully-zeroed drive must conform to what is expected of a bootable device on the target mainboard, for one thing the partition(s) often needs to be well-aligned with the underlying storage hardware to a more particular degree than merely when it is a "perfectly" readable & writeable drive.

Many new USB sticks fail at this fundamental point because the factory partitioning & formatting was accomplished using an image not exactly appropriate after the vendors of the silicon storage or controller chips make hardware revisions.

Analogously, also why writing an IMG or dd from a not-very-identical stick, or with dissimilar partitioning and/or formatting is quite hit or miss.

Sometimes freshly reformatting is enough for problem sticks, other times they can not be made to boot without repartitioning. Either way a fresh reformat or repartition may simply overwrite using (proven nonoptimal) disk structures still remaining in place unless the device is zeroed beforehand. Sometimes a reboot is needed for an OS to forget the structure that was recognized during most recent insertion.

I like Ventoy (and Rufus) but for best results I start with a proven bootable stick which I prepare manually from a zeroed stick and verify bootability beforehand. Similar preparation when getting ready to manually write reliable plain Windows Setup USBs from the mounted ISO.

25. m-p-3 ◴[] No.45771215[source]
I used it but I had various amount of success. I bought an HDD enclosure that would mount the ISO/VHD/FDD image at the hardware level (IODD is the brand), and that worked mostly consistently.

A bit expensive, but when you rely on it for work it's worth investing a bit of money.

26. fuzzfactor ◴[] No.45784886{6}[source]
I love this example.

This is pretty advanced, and who knows if anybody else is doing it exactly like this or not, but it is exactly what the hardware is supposed to be easily capable of, just as easily as what the vast mainstream users are getting out of the hardware by "default".

This type versatile performance is built-in just like the mainstream arrangement is built-in, the thing is you have to figure it out for yourself through the complex web of capabilities that have been long bypassed in order to make the default experience seem like it is actually simpler or more reliable, when it is not.