Ventoy: Create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI Files

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?

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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!

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!

ChatMBR.

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)

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

I always eject/sync the drive, but I'll triple check next time, thank you.

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.

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.