Ventoy

Ventoy is a free and open source tool to create drives that allow you to select and boot any EFI, IMG, ISO, VHD(x), or WIM files stored on a rewritable partition on the drive.

Most types of operating systems are supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/ChromeOS/Unix/VMware/Xen...), see the full list.

Installation

Install the ventoy-bin^AUR or ventoy^AUR package.

Usage

Warning: The drive used will be erased and all its existing data will be lost after setup.

There are three utilities for setting up the media:

/opt/ventoy/Ventoy2Disk.sh, which is a shell script to be run from the command line.
/opt/ventoy/VentoyGUI.x86_64, which is a graphical application. xauth or a similar application is needed to escalate to root if the application is not started with root permissions.
Opening file:///opt/ventoy/WebUI/index.html with a web browser.

The same utilities can be used for upgrading the Ventoy installation on the drive.

Ventoy creates two partitions on the drive. Their default names are Ventoy and VTOYEFI. The Ventoy partition is to store the bootable images (iso files), and any other data. VTOYEFI is for the Ventoy binaries.

To add images from which you can boot, mount the first partition and copy the images over.

Tip: You can copy the images anywhere on your Ventoy partition. There is no need to put them in the root directory or keep them together.

Use without installing

If you just want to create a multi-boot drive, you can simply download the pre-built executable at the GitHub releases page. You need dosfstools to be installed because a vfat partition is created by using mkfs.vfat. After verifying the sha256sum and unpacking, you can display the included CLI's[1] help page by running the shell script without any arguments:

# ./ventoy-VERSION/Ventoy2Disk.sh

You can afterwards upgrade the drive for future versions by following a similar procedure. Downloading a NEWER-VERSION, verifying the sha256sum, unpacking, running

# ./ventoy-NEWER-VERSION/Ventoy2Disk.sh

and following the on screen help message.

As an alternative to the shell script mentioned here, a GTK/qt [2], and a webUI[3], are also included.

Tips and tricks

What version is already installed?

With Ventoy2Disk.sh utility mentioned earlier, start, and do not approve, an upgrade process (-u). It will inform from which version it intends to upgrade, before asking for confirmation.

Checking files integrity

As described in upstream documentation, a built-in checksum utility allows verification of the integrity of the files on the disk.