Ventoy Is the Best Way to Create a Bootable Disk for PC and Linux
It doesn’t matter whether you’re testing Linux or installing Windows: creating a boot disk is an annoying process. What if you could format your hard drive once to boot, and then simply drag and drop ISO files onto it to boot from them? That’s what Ventoy offers.
Why would anyone need an external hard drive or flash drive full of bootable operating systems? Well, first of all, it’s a fun way to try out different operating systems without having to install them. Most Linux distributions allow you to try them out in a live environment before installing them—with Ventoy, testing is even faster because you don’t have to burn the image to disk each time. But such a tool also makes it easy to manage a selection of operating systems to install and store them all on one device, which is great if you’re the kind of person who regularly repairs computers.
After installation, there is a partition where you can place ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x) and EFI files. In theory this should work for any boot image – there’sa list of tested ISOs if you want to confirm the one you’re thinking of. Please note that macOS is not supported and Ventoy will not load on Mac devices.
To get started, download Ventoy for your operating system and launch it. Connect the drive you want to use to boot operating systems. (Note that Ventoy can technically write to internal hard drives, but by default only maps external drives – this is to prevent accidental overwriting of internal drives.)
Select the drive you want to burn to and click Install . Ventoy reformats the drive to have two partitions: one where you’ll boot, and another, much larger one, where you can put image files. Drag as many images as you like into this section. You can even sort your images into folders if you want—Ventoy will search for all compatible files, even if they’re in subfolders.
For testing, I put several common Linux distributions and a Windows 11 installer on my disk. Then I restarted my computer and booted from the disk. I immediately saw all ISO files as an option.
I tested all of these and can confirm that they loaded as if I had burned them directly to disk. This will be my primary method for testing live Linux environments and installing operating systems on PCs in the future.