Ventoy: One USB Drive That Boots Whatever ISO You Drop On It

The problem Ventoy removes: reformatting a stick for every installer

The traditional way to make a bootable USB drive is to write one image onto it with a tool such as dd, Rufus or the Fedora Media Writer. That erases whatever was there. If you keep Windows 11, Ubuntu, a MemTest86 image and a rescue disk around, you either own four sticks or you rewrite one stick each time you need a different image. Ventoy's answer is to install a small boot environment onto the drive once, then treat the rest of the drive as ordinary storage. The README states the workflow plainly: "you don't need to format the disk over and over, just copy the image files to the USB drive and boot them."

The audience is anyone who maintains a toolkit rather than a single installer: support engineers, people who reinstall operating systems often, technicians who carry rescue and diagnostic images, and anyone who wants a portable drive that boots on both old BIOS machines and modern UEFI ones. The README lists Windows, WinPE, a very long list of Linux distributions, Unix variants such as FreeBSD and pfSense, ChromeOS derivatives, and hypervisors including VMware ESXi and XenServer. The project says 1300+ ISO files have been tested and that 90%+ of the distributions tracked on distrowatch.com are supported.

How the Ventoy boot mechanism actually works

Ventoy is not a chainloader that extracts an ISO and boots the extracted kernel. The README says it boots "directly from ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files, no extraction needed," and that the image files do not need to be contiguous on disk. That second property matters: it means you can copy, delete and re-copy files on the Ventoy partition with a normal file manager, and the drive still works. A tool that required contiguous files would need a defragmentation step after every change.

The repository layout shows the shape of the implementation. There is a GRUB2 directory, an EDK2 directory for the UEFI side, IPXE, wimboot, and a group of small C components named vtoycli, vtoyfat, vtoygpt and vtoyjump. There are also vendored libraries for ExFAT, FUSEISO, SQUASHFS, LZIP and ZSTD, plus cryptsetup and DMSETUP. The practical reading is that Ventoy ships its own filesystem and image-parsing code rather than relying on the host firmware to understand the ISO. That is why a single drive can present an x86 Legacy BIOS boot, an IA32 or x86_64 UEFI boot, and ARM64 or MIPS64EL UEFI boot from the same layout, and why both MBR and GPT partition styles are handled the same way.

The main partition can be formatted as FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, UDF, XFS, Btrfs, or Ext2/3/4, and the README notes that ISO files larger than 4GB are supported. That combination is the reason exFAT or NTFS is the usual choice: FAT32 alone cannot hold a single file above 4GB, which rules out many Windows images.

Installing Ventoy and booting your first ISO

Ventoy ships prebuilt installers for Windows and Linux, plus a live CD, and the project also publishes a Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml in the repository root. The Dockerfile builds on centos:7 and installs a long list of build dependencies, then runs the build script:

FROM centos:7

RUN sed -i \
    -e 's/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/' \
    -e 's/^#baseurl/baseurl/' \
    -e 's/mirror\.centos\.org/vault.centos.org/' \
    /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo && \
    yum -y -q install libXpm net-tools bzip2 wget vim gcc gcc-c++ samba dos2unix

CMD cd /ventoy/INSTALL && ls -la && sh docker_ci_build.sh

That path is for building from source, not for making a bootable drive. For the drive itself, the practical route on Linux is the installer binary from the release page. The repository's INSTALL directory is where the build script lives, and the release notes for v1.1.17 (published 2026-07-24) are the authoritative changelog for what changed in that version.

After installation the drive has a small EFI partition and a large data partition. The README's claim is that copying image files onto that partition is the whole workflow, and the project's own example of the resulting layout is the file list on the Ventoy drive. The README does not publish a shell command for the copy step, so use your file manager or your own copy command, then wait for the write to finish before rebooting.

After the copy finishes, reboot the target machine and select the USB drive from the firmware boot menu. Ventoy presents its own menu listing the image files it found, and selecting one boots it. The README notes that you can also browse and boot images stored on a local disk, not only on the Ventoy drive, which is documented under the Ventoy Browser feature.

One naming detail worth knowing before you start: the README says menu alias and menu tip message are supported, and the project ships a separate GUI configurator called VentoyPlugson for plugin configuration. Those are the supported ways to change labels and behaviour, rather than editing files by hand.

Secure Boot, persistence and the cases where Ventoy is the wrong tool

Secure Boot is the first real friction point. The README states that IA32 and x86_64 UEFI Secure Boot are supported from version 1.0.07 onward, and the repository carries a SecureBoot.md file describing the process. The mechanism is the standard one for this class of tool: you enrol the project's key in the firmware's own key database. That is a trust decision about the machine, not about Ventoy, and on a locked-down corporate laptop you may not have the authority to make it. On machines where you cannot enrol a key, Ventoy will not boot with Secure Boot enabled.

The second limitation is that Ventoy is not a general-purpose disk imaging tool. It boots images; it does not write a disk image sector-for-sector onto a target disk, and it is not a replacement for dd when you need an exact clone. If your goal is to restore a full disk backup, a tool built for that is the right choice.

The third is breadth versus depth. Ventoy's compatibility comes from a large amount of special-case handling, and the project maintains a tested-image list rather than a guarantee. The README links to ventoy.net/en/isolist.html for the list and to a GitHub issue (#1195) explaining how to report a successfully tested image. An image that is not on that list is not necessarily broken, but it is untested, and unusual boot loaders are where you should expect to spend time.

Finally, the README does not document a rollback or uninstall procedure for returning a drive to a plain single-partition state. If you need that, plan for it before you install.

Ventoy versus Rufus: two different jobs

Rufus and Ventoy are usually compared because both produce bootable USB drives, but they take opposite approaches. Rufus writes an image onto a drive: you pick the ISO, pick the target device, and it writes the content, which means the drive holds exactly one installer afterward. Ventoy installs a boot environment once and then boots image files that you copy on as files. The difference shows up in daily use. With Rufus, switching from a Windows installer to a Linux live image means rewriting the drive and waiting. With Ventoy, it means copying one more file.

The trade-off runs the other way too. Rufus produces a drive whose contents are exactly the installer, with no extra boot layer and no key enrolment for Secure Boot on most images. Ventoy adds a bootloader, a partition layout and a Secure Boot key to the picture. If you are handing a drive to someone else, or shipping it to a customer, the simpler artifact is often the better one. The same reasoning applies to tools that write a single distribution's image, such as a distribution's own media writer: they do one thing with fewer moving parts.

The honest summary is that Ventoy is a toolkit and Rufus is a one-shot writer. If your drive is a toolbox you keep and update, Ventoy wins on effort. If your drive is a delivery vehicle for one image, the extra layer buys you nothing.

Licence, maintenance and what upgrading costs you

Ventoy is licensed under GPL-3.0, and the repository carries both a COPYING file and a License directory. For individual use the practical effect is that you can use and redistribute it, and that if you distribute a modified version you must do so under the same licence with source. For a company that wants to bake Ventoy into a shipped appliance, that is a real obligation and worth handing to whoever handles licensing, rather than treating as a formality. Nothing here is legal advice.

On maintenance, the repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-07-24, which is the same date as the v1.1.17 release. The two preceding releases, v1.1.16 and v1.1.15, are dated 2026-06-25. That is the release cadence visible from the tags, and it is the only maintenance signal available: there is no published support policy, no long-term-support branch and no documented deprecation schedule.

Upgrade cost is low by design. Because the image files live on the data partition as ordinary files, reinstalling or upgrading the Ventoy boot environment does not touch them. The README's central claim, that you do not reformat the disk over and over, is what makes the upgrade path cheap. The thing to check before upgrading is the release notes for the version you are moving to, since the boot environment is the part that changes and the images are the part that does not.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt Ventoy if you regularly carry several installers, rescue images or live distros and want them all on one drive that you update by copying files. Skip it if your workflow is a single Windows installer written once, or if you need a bootable drive for a platform the project does not list (the README names Android and macOS only as ISO targets, not as hosts). Before trusting it in production, verify three things yourself: that Secure Boot works on your target machines after enrolling the key described in SecureBoot.md, that your specific ISO appears in the tested list at ventoy.net/en/isolist.html, and that the partition style you need (MBR or GPT) is what the installer wrote. The repository's last push was on 2026-07-24, and the code is C under GPL-3.0, so any fork you ship must carry the same licence.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official documentation
2. Official README
3. Project repository
4. Release notes