Check out Ventoy! Unless you need a single ISO on the drive, it’s just something you install to it and then copy and paste ISOs to the folder on it. No flashing needed, it runs them for you. I’ve got 128GB drives almost filled with every ISO I could possibly want.
Also worth noting, you should create file named .ventoyignore in the directories with other files. Otherwise Ventoy searches everything which slows it down.
Note that some devices aren’t able to correctly mount the second partition.
I guess this is because the first partition is used to boot ventoy, while the second partition holds data and some devices (e.g. printers) won’t mount the second partition.
PS: I nearly wasn’t able to hold a presentation because of this, luckily a second stick/phone/copy on web storage saved me, iirc.
This only ever really applies to devices without UIs or otherwise embedded OSs, and personally I wouldn’t trust a drive with more than a handful of files in such a device anyway.
It still works for installing the OS though, at least in the case of Nix. I’ve not tried Guix so far, but I’ve installed NixOS on two machines in the past year using Ventoy.
Interesting. I wonder if it’s an incompatible UEFI/BIOS? Both of the machines I put it on were fairly new, one was first boot on a server I built, the other was a recent laptop that I decided to run it on for a while.
Check out Ventoy! Unless you need a single ISO on the drive, it’s just something you install to it and then copy and paste ISOs to the folder on it. No flashing needed, it runs them for you. I’ve got 128GB drives almost filled with every ISO I could possibly want.
Also worth mentioning you can copy more files on it afterwards and it works as normal storage too.
Also worth noting, you should create file named
.ventoyignorein the directories with other files. Otherwise Ventoy searches everything which slows it down.I personally just set the index depth to 0 in the config so it only searches the root directory for bootable files
Note that some devices aren’t able to correctly mount the second partition.
I guess this is because the first partition is used to boot ventoy, while the second partition holds data and some devices (e.g. printers) won’t mount the second partition.
PS: I nearly wasn’t able to hold a presentation because of this, luckily a second stick/phone/copy on web storage saved me, iirc.
This only ever really applies to devices without UIs or otherwise embedded OSs, and personally I wouldn’t trust a drive with more than a handful of files in such a device anyway.
Wow this seems amazing, I could test so many things lol! Thanks for solving my problem :)
I have a durable metal ventoy usb on my keys with portable apps basically a walking IT dept, I mean I am a solo IT/Dev and I’m pretty basic so…hmmm
not enough upvotes
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It still works for installing the OS though, at least in the case of Nix. I’ve not tried Guix so far, but I’ve installed NixOS on two machines in the past year using Ventoy.
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Interesting. I wonder if it’s an incompatible UEFI/BIOS? Both of the machines I put it on were fairly new, one was first boot on a server I built, the other was a recent laptop that I decided to run it on for a while.