Multi-boot USB drives

Shashank Sharma can't parallel park, but he knows how to just copy and paste live distributions into a USB drive to boot 'em up.

- Shashank Sharma

VENTOY

Credit: www.ventoy.net

OUR EXPERT

Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia..

As far as we’re concerned, the birth of live installable distributions remains the greatest watershed moment for the Linux ecosystem. You could quickly burn distributions on to a CD or DVD (you’re making us sad!–Ed) and boot into a functional Linux environment, without having to suffer through an installation and all that it entails. The only downside to this approach was the single-use nature of the CD/ DVDs. But even this problem was overcome with USB drives, which you could wipe them clean and put in a new distribution at your pleasure.

With Ventoy, you can easily create multi-boot USB drives in almost no time at all. You can also deploy Ventoy onto a SD card, or even SSD, NVMe drives. You can also configure persistent mode on your Ventoy device, meaning that any changes you make to a Live session of a distribution will be available on subsequent reboots. For users looking to run an unattended installation, Ventoy supports this feature on distros such as Debian, Fedora, RHEL and Ubuntu Server.

The tool also has support for ISO files larger than 4GB in size, a customisable theme and menu, non-destructive upgrades and more. In addition to hundreds of Linux distributions, Ventoy has also been tested to work with a host of Unix operating systems. You’ll find a list of these on the project’s GitHub page (https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy).