If we were to tell you that there’s a new tool for creating bootable USB drives that’s worth checking out, you would most probably be asking yourself the following question: “why would I be interested since there already are many popular and well-established apps for this particular task such as Rufus, or balenaEtcher?”
Fair question, however, before anything else, let’s meet the app in question. It’s called Ventoy, it’s totally free, open-source, and it’s capable of running on most Linux distributions and Windows alike.
Two main reasons for using Ventoy
To answer your question, you should be interested in checking out Ventoy because it’s different from other apps of this sort. While typical apps for creating bootable USD devices (usually using ISO images) work by extracting the contents first.
Ventoy is special in this regard, since it basically puts the ISO images on the drive, without having to extract them. This not only means that it’s faster, but it also means that you can place multiple ISO images on the USB device. Pretty neat, right?
Long story short, with Ventoy, you can boot into different versions of Windows or/and different Linux distributions FROM THE SAME USB DEVICE, and without having to format the disk over and over.
What about features?
With the basics out of the way, we can now talk about Ventoy’s other features that, trust us on this one, only make it better. Here’s how it works: you copy as many image files on the device as you like, and the app provides you with a neat boot menu from where you can select them (upon restarting your computer, of course).
You can also browse and boot ISO, WIN, IMG, VHD(x), and EFI files in and from your local disk (without the need for extraction). The app can also be installed on the USBs, local disks, SSDs, NVMes, and pretty much any type of SD Cards.
In addition, know that both MBR and GPT partition styles are supported, and the app also comes with support for most x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, and MIPS64EL UEFI.
Probably the most impressive feature of Ventoy is the fact that it supports pretty much any OS you can think of (up to 1000+ ISO files tested with success). The app also comes with support for Secure Boot, support for changing the filesystem of the first partition, support for persistence in the case of some Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint), and support for auto-installation.
For the full list of features (and trust us, there not a few), as well as some very useful documentation sections, you can check out the project’s official website.
Verdict
Ventoy is a unique, interesting, and powerful tool for creating bootable USB devices. It may not be the oldest or the most popular tool in the business, but the way Ventoy works and what it can do is remarkable.
It’s a tool that allows you to put ISO images directly on your device, and it does so without over complicating the process, without being intimidating (even for new users), and all while being completely free and open-source.
