Nope, they don't have time for this. Too much work om security through obscurity, making crap SW which eats RAM like hamburgers and disabling local accounts...
But of course it’s highly simplified and designed solely for installing Windows.
I swear the most recommended way of creating a bootable Windows USB on Linux changes every year, and usually doesn't work. I keep an old Windows laptop just so I can create bootable Windows usbs, whenever needed.
Those are the kind of hamburgers that make people say "Where's the beef?"
I've also had a very hard time creating an automated install media for an appliance for windows iot... Worst was the (LLM generated?) powershell scripts in the documentation that didn't work at all.
The Windows approach is based on a mix of relatively limited offline modifications and automating clicks and keystrokes (AutoUnattend.xml, OOBE.xml) and recording or forgetting manual changes (Audit Mode, Sysprep). Both are insanely kludgey.
New development of the tooling always comes to dism.exe first rather than the DISM PowerShell module, so you may need to use DOS commands instead of the (very lovely) modern shell that Microsoft maintains.
Depending on what kind of stuff you're trying to install, you might need to do half a dozen reboots in the course of recording your manual changes.
Mounting/unmounting a WIM file can take more than a minute (wtf?) and if you're working on modifying one of the installer images from upstream, you need dozens of gigabytes of free disk space.
If you don't just want install media, but a bootable repair environment, everything is even worse. Hardware recognition is bad, boot is slow, and only some programs can actually run in a WinPE environment.
Have you ever customized bootable Linux media?
When I had to make some custom NixOS install media for an aarch64 VPS, it required only a few lines of code in the exact same environment as I use to customize running systems, and it's completely declarative, non-interactive, requires no special toolkit, doesn't require dozens of gigabytes of scratch space, never requires me to boot anything...
Teenage interns can also shovel manure, but that doesn't make it pleasant or painless!
It’s honestly wild how convenient it is. Ventoy was the only method that worked for me when I needed to install Windows alongside an existing Linux setup for dual-booting. Everything else I tried failed, but Ventoy handled it perfectly.
Am I doing something wrong?
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)
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.
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
A bit expensive, but when you rely on it for work it's worth investing a bit of money.
One other small advantage is with secure boot you only need to register Ventoy once with a machine and then all the ISOs will boot, whereas with different USB sticks and images each has to be registered individually and some of them don't work with secure boot so you have to turn it off. Just another convenience.
Tested isos: Windows 10 x64 (Pro, LTSC), Windows 11 (Pro, LTSC). I've installed windows on hundreds of computers with Ventoy and it never failed me.
About the BLOBs in Ventoy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44810281 - Aug 2025 (57 comments)
Ventoy Is Saving Me Time, Money, and USB Sticks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933664 - May 2025 (2 comments)
iVentoy installing unsafe Windows Kernel drivers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909824 - May 2025 (8 comments)
Ventoy: Remove BLOBs from the Source Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40689629 - June 2024 (49 comments)
Ventoy – Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619822 - June 2024 (19 comments)
Ventoy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38672112 - Dec 2023 (111 comments)
Ventoy: A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055765 - May 2023 (1 comment)
Ventoy, ISO USB Solution 10/10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32901483 - Sept 2022 (4 comments)
A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28889392 - Oct 2021 (47 comments)
Ventoy makes making bootable USB drives easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273289 - Aug 2020 (11 comments)
Ventoy: A new bootable USB solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241485 - Aug 2020 (106 comments)
Ventoy – A New Bootable USB Solution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23394714 - June 2020 (6 comments)
Ventoy: Boot different ISO files from a USB stick - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23060019 - May 2020 (1 comment)
Kind of a pain, I think any machine that's had windows on it will get this setting enabled.
It supports multiple images at the same time, unlike the other solutions where one image take over the whole USB stick.
Love it.
And Rufus is the product of continuous improvement, maintained brilliantly.
SSD+USB+GRUB with either a single GRUB partition and multiple ISO files stored in subdirectories, OR one parition per ISO/OS.
Adding new ISOs would require some manual editing of the grub config but wouldn't this be a decent substitute??
Like many people I'm hesitant to use an OS installation tool that has not been thoroughly reviewed to ensure there is no malware in binary blobs.
Alternatively, does anyone know if you can install Ventoy to a partition on an internal disk? The documentation says it supports booting images stored on local disks, but doesnt say if Ventoy itself can be installed on a partition as opposed to an entire disk.
The really intriguing feature is the ability to run vDisk files (as long as there's a linux distro within it) thanks to the VtoyBoot plugin[1]. I'm actually trying to build my own customized arch version with all my software (and potentially keys) installed so I can get rid of having to bring around any hardware. The only problem I'm facing is that it seems that ventoy boot does not work very well with luks containers.
[1] VtoyBoot plugin: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html
For those not familiar with it, it turns your Android phone into a USB DVD drive, meaning not only can you just download and host any distro with a few taps, you also don't need any hybrid ISOs or anything like that, the computer sees a real DVD so even old or weird machines accept it.
It is compatible with both older devices that configure USB via init scripts and newer devices that use Android's USB gadget HAL, but it does require Android 11+.
There are some shortcomings, like a bug where it doesn't remember the last selected ISO if its filename is too long, files also need to be fully sequential. These might be fixed in their newer models (the 2531 is fairly old).
I would also highly recommend iventoy, if you want to just boot using network device : https://www.iventoy.com/en/index.html. It came in very handy when I had a machine which only had a CD/DVD ROM, floppy and netboot option. I didn't want to waste a DVD-R so just booted via network.
Also DOS will not recognize files on anything but well-tempered FAT32 volumes usually, and the drive device needs to be MBR layout, not GPT. Plus the motherboard needs to support legacy CSM and have it enabled unless it's an old native-BIOS-only non-UEFI PC.
Otherwise its excellent.
As in yeah there's precompiled binaries in this. But it's audited and each binary itself has a link to build instructions. What they are not doing is actually building everything from scratch in their build process. Ok that's a pain to do and i get it. But... i don't see anyone slipping in an unaccounted for binary here right? If every binary itself has a "here's how to build this from scratch" documentation and source it seems ok to me.
I am not willing to use the software due to that issue. It just seems suspicious.
[1] https://github.com/JinbaIttai/phonestick
[2] https://github.com/overzero-git/DriveDroid-fix-Magisk-module
You have to format the SD card in a PC first, perhaps also repartition beforehand.
Even the old Sony smartphones before there were iPhones could do it with their MemorySticks. I really do miss the non-Android non-iOS smartphones.
It manifests itself as the dreaded "a media driver your computer needs is missing" error message when trying to start the install.
If you're using the FreeDOS ISO in Ventoy, maybe replacing it with a FreeDOS IMG that is a bitwise copy of a working "floppy" image would be a workaround?
Or add a second partition on your Ventoy stick for FreeDOS to occupy on its own and choose it like bare metal dual-boot style?
I actually still put MS-DOS on some sticks [0], haven't used FreeDOS in a number of years, but either way I do prefer for the stick to have a partition table and resemble a HDD, rather than the simpler non-partitioned floppy-simulating layout, even when they both work.
[0] People are still not disappointed by Tetris :)
Perhaps this is obvious to many in this context, but this refers to the partitioning scheme for the disk—not the LLM service.
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)
As in it's completely source buildable with no unknown binaries. They just don't have a single 'build' that pulls all of these in and builds them at once. Instead you're following the build instructions for each part, creating libraries that you then link together at the end. This is due to the pain in the ass of cross-compiling Linux/Windows/UEFI binaries all in the one project. It's pretty reasonable.
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.
Turns out you can't just dd a windows iso onto a usb drive.
You have to format it to fat32, then manually copy all the files. However there is one big installer file which is above 4gb, so you have to get some tool (also provided by Microsoft) to split the file into multiple files less than 4gb. The windows installer will recognize the split files and use those instead.
It's beyond me why the official windows iso just doesn't have this by default...
But instead of the process you describe (which some tools will do for you) I used Rufus to copy the install files onto a USB formatted as a NTFS partition, working around the 4GB limitation.
What you sometimes need is a USB stick having a native "geometry" in terms of HDD emulation ability, that will be recognized properly by the particular series of chipset on the target mainboard.
Then the data bits written to a fully-zeroed drive must conform to what is expected of a bootable device on the target mainboard, for one thing the partition(s) often needs to be well-aligned with the underlying storage hardware to a more particular degree than merely when it is a "perfectly" readable & writeable drive.
Many new USB sticks fail at this fundamental point because the factory partitioning & formatting was accomplished using an image not exactly appropriate after the vendors of the silicon storage or controller chips make hardware revisions.
Analogously, also why writing an IMG or dd from a not-very-identical stick, or with dissimilar partitioning and/or formatting is quite hit or miss.
Sometimes freshly reformatting is enough for problem sticks, other times they can not be made to boot without repartitioning. Either way a fresh reformat or repartition may simply overwrite using (proven nonoptimal) disk structures still remaining in place unless the device is zeroed beforehand. Sometimes a reboot is needed for an OS to forget the structure that was recognized during most recent insertion.
I like Ventoy (and Rufus) but for best results I start with a proven bootable stick which I prepare manually from a zeroed stick and verify bootability beforehand. Similar preparation when getting ready to manually write reliable plain Windows Setup USBs from the mounted ISO.
Rufus puts such a driver in its FAT32 boot partition and loads it before starting the winpe.
It drives me nuts that the UEFI sites never included ExFAT.