Ventoy is a free, open-source tool for making a bootable USB drive that can hold many operating system images at once. You prepare the drive with Ventoy a single time, then copy ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x) and EFI files onto it and pick one from a boot menu at startup. The preparation tools run on Windows and Linux. The drive itself boots on PCs with Legacy BIOS or UEFI firmware, including IA32, x86_64, ARM64 and MIPS64EL UEFI systems. It is released under the GPL-3.0 license.
Copying images instead of flashing them
Rather than overwriting the drive with one image, Ventoy installs a small boot environment and leaves a large data partition. You store images there as ordinary files. Adding a system means copying its ISO, and removing one means deleting the file. Ventoy boots the images directly without extracting them, and they do not need to sit in contiguous space on the disk.
The drive can still carry ordinary files too. Images can go in any folder; Ventoy searches the whole partition, including subfolders, and lists everything it finds. A newly released Linux distribution does not require a Ventoy update to boot.
How Ventoy lays out the drive
Installing Ventoy erases the target device and creates two partitions. The large first partition holds the images and uses exFAT by default for compatibility with Windows, Linux and macOS. You can reformat it as FAT32, NTFS, UDF, XFS or Ext2/3/4. The XFS and Ext options suit Linux-only use because Windows cannot read them or install from them. ISO files larger than 4 GB are supported. A second, small partition holds Ventoy’s EFI boot files.
Install options cover MBR or GPT partitioning, Secure Boot support, a volume label and reserved space at the end of the disk for extra partitions. Updating Ventoy later keeps the image partition and its files intact. You can also install Ventoy on internal disks, SSDs, NVMe drives and SD cards.
The boot menu and its modes
At startup Ventoy shows a menu based on GRUB2. In the default list mode every image appears in one alphabetical list. TreeView mode instead mirrors the folder structure on the drive, which suits large, categorized collections. F3 switches between the two. F2 opens a browser for booting images from the computer’s local disk.
Ctrl+D toggles Memdisk mode, which loads a whole ISO into RAM before booting. This helps stubborn images start, especially under Legacy BIOS. It suits small, self-contained systems such as WinPE, live rescue discs or memory testers, since the booted system cannot reach the ISO afterwards.
Ventoy also boots Windows VHD and VHDX virtual disks and Linux virtual disk files. Windows VHD(x) booting needs an extra boot image copied to the drive, because it uses Microsoft components outside the open-source package.
Secure Boot handling
With Secure Boot support enabled at install and Secure Boot active on a computer, Ventoy shows a key enrollment screen on its first start there. After this one-time enrollment, that machine boots the drive without turning Secure Boot off.
Plugins configured through ventoy.json
Ventoy’s advanced behavior comes from plugins defined in one ventoy.json file on the drive. Hand-editing is optional. The included VentoyPlugson opens a local web page on Windows or Linux. You change settings in the browser and save them straight to the file. Most settings can apply to one image or to every image in a folder.
Persistence and unattended installs
The persistence plugin links a live Linux ISO to a data file on the drive, so changes made in the live session survive a reboot. One ISO can have several such files. You pick a file from a menu before boot. Ubuntu, Arch and their derivatives are the main targets. The auto-install plugin attaches setup scripts to unmodified installation ISOs: Windows unattend XML, Kickstart, Preseed, cloud-init or AutoYaST. Scripts can contain variables that Ventoy fills in at boot. It either asks the user for a value or detects details such as the first non-Ventoy disk.
Menu, access and injection options
- Themes: any GRUB2 theme can restyle the menu, along with resolution, fonts and text or serial display modes. Several themes can be rotated or matched to the screen resolution.
- Menu labels: aliases replace file names with readable titles, and menu tips add short descriptions.
- Passwords: a password can guard the whole menu, all files of one type, or a particular image or folder. It is simple protection against misuse, not encryption.
- Injection: Ventoy extracts an archive into the booted WinPE or Linux initramfs environment, for example to add Windows drivers.
