Ventoy suggestions

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Peter Blanchard

Active Member
Jun 30, 2022
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Finally got round to setting up Ventoy on 128GB USB device.

I've put TrueNAS Scale and Ubuntu Studio on it so far but I was wondering what recovery etc live distros are genuinely useful?
 

Stephan

Well-Known Member
Apr 21, 2017
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Germany
I made my own VHD with Windows 10 because with all these softwares pre-installed (and w_arez I take it?) you are at great risk of infecting all your stuff with malware. Mostly coin stealers but still.

For everything else I just use an Arch Linux live installation that sits on an MBR BTRFS partition. Boots everything that came out in the last 20 years, connects to everything (wifi or ethernet, DHCP client on all interfaces). For nasty fringe cases, SystemRescueCd. But usually I just adapt the Arch installation so I can flash firmware to controllers, run a stress test etc.
 
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Greg_E

Active Member
Oct 10, 2024
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HBCD, Partedmagic are two of the ones I use the most. And often HBCD gets "burned" to a drive so I can add drivers and things like BIOS updates.

Keep your favorite linux live disk on there.

Also be aware that not every image will install or boot from Ventoy, you may still need to "burn" stuff to another flash drive, so keep a few on hand. One example that often trips me up, Ventoy will UEFI boot, then you try to launch something that is BIOS only. Often you can get around this by selecting the BIOS boot mode of Ventoy, but doesn't always work.
 

nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
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I started with Ventoy, but after 2 of the first 3 things I tried failed, I bought an iodd ST300 and put an 800GB Intel DS S3520 (lower power than other enterprise drives) inside. Everything just works. They also make a version with a built-in SSD, but reviews say it gets hot, and I wanted to be able to replace the disk if I need to.

If there is software that builds an image on the fly and demands that it write directly to a USB drive, you can create a VHD on the iodd and present that as a USB disk. Otherwise, I just copy files to the NTFS-formatted drive. I can even use NTFS symlinks so I can virtually organize the images in folders that correspond to a category.