Looking for recommendations for a versatile USB stick with Ventoy. I’m trying to create the “perfect, all-in-all” USB stick using Ventoy to store various ISOs and rescue tools. So far, I have the following ISOs:
- Arch
- OpenSuse TW
- NixOS
- Bazzite + AuroraDX
- Win10 ISO
- Clonezilla
I’m looking for suggestions on additional ISOs or tools that are compatible with Ventoy. What do you recommend adding to make my USB stick to make it more useful?
I’m an arch user, and also have a small proxmox based homelab. I always have a live Ubuntu around, the latest desktop version available. Good for troubleshooting. Also, latest proxmox, opnsense, pfsense, debian.
Additionally, I have a small USB drive on my keychain with both USB C and USB A, where I keep some encrypted backups of important stuff, and I can access that from both my laptop and my phone.
Ventoy with Arch and Rescue bootable images. And a portable cross platform encryption tool just in case.
Can you give us some names? Sounds intriguing
Rescue image: SystemRescue
Portable Encryption Tool: Picocrypt
It’s like…maybe like an eagle or something?
Hirens boot cd is a great tool if you’re working with windows. You are not always going to need it, but when you do need it it’s awfully nice to have it.
Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!
It actually saved my life a few months back, I had a dying windows server I needed to resurrect and the tools on there were perfect for it.
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I don’t keep a Swiss army knife set of distros anymore. I put tumbleweed on a USB. It’s rolling so I update it when I plug it in, then do what I need to do.
I used to have a USB with Ubuntu LTS and whatever the newest Ubuntu was. Then another would get something else that I needed/wanted. I always ended up wiping the drive and adding the newest release every single time. I was always out of date by the time I needed one of them for boot repair or something. This was also a time when persistence… Wasn’t very persistent. With tumbleweed I can install whatever I need and it’s there next time. I’m sure you can do the same with any other rolling release, but tumbleweed is in my opinion on par stability-wise with incremental distros. It’s my first grab whenever I need to check a PC. If I need another distro or boot USB, I can make it from this one with a second USB. I suppose the only thing I can’t do is make a bootable USB if the computer I’m on can’t access the Internet
I keep an iodd mini with all the current and past repair isos. Then I have a folder.i keep the tooling income.upmwoth for various repair or automation stuff. I got a batch script (need to move to winger) to auto install all my standard day one software. On mobile otherwise I would pull up the list and throw it in here. If you are curious let me know and I’ll reply with the list when I get time.
Test out that Nix, Mine refused to let me install from it when I just shoved their iso in Ventoy.
Someone got a hackintosh running from ventoy on specific hardware
- I’ve been trying to get a x86 Android one working, no luck yet.
- Kali
- WinPE EasUS partition manager liveboot
- Gandalf’s win10PE
- Gandalf’s win11PE
- Hirens CD PE (debatably useless in this age)
- Win10
- Win11
- Fedora
- Fedora Server
- Hirens
Looking at my Ventoy stick i have multiple folders for different OS:
Arch_Based:
- CachyOS
- Garuda
Debian_Based:
- Debian Bookworm
- Mint
- Zorin OS
Fedora_Based:
- Fedora Silverblue
- Nobara
GamingBox
- Bazzite
- ChimeraOS
ServerOS:
- Ubuntu Server
- TrueNAS Scale
Windows:
- Tiny10
- Tiny11
Tools:
- Avira Rescue System
- SuperGrub2
- UBCD
Thanks for sharing! What size is your usb-stick?
It’s a 64GB stick and i manually keep it in sync with my netbootxyz instance
Ohhh I’ve meant to try out netbootxyz for a while now, thanks for the reminder!
you’re welcome!
to be fair, it’s more of a gimmick when using it in your home. I have a notebook that i use to test out new distros on and i can hook it up to my LAN and quickly install something without whipping out the USB stick.
Also the mini gaming pc hooked to my TV is a victim of being reinstalled every couple months after i tinker around too much.
Ventoy
Arch Linu, Kubuntu, Supergrub, Tails, Kali, Windows
Do yourself a favor and skip the USB drive - they are ridiculously slow compared to a compact external SSD. I found a cheap m.2 enclosure on Amazon and put an old SSD in it and the speed difference is breathtaking.
My SSD has a bunch of Linux distros grouped into folders along with Windows 10 & 11, every macOS from 10.13 to present, along with Rescuezilla, Hiren’s and a few others I can’t remember at the moment.
Rescuezilla was my #1 go-to during my days of distro hopping. Makes it super easy to try out a distro on bare metal instead of a VM.
How do you select which one to boot?
Check out ventoy
I use Ventoy to boot everything but macOS. Those installers need their own partitions on the SSD.
Does anyone else have/use Foxclone?
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Inside Ventoy: SystemRescue, Clonezilla, Debian netinstall, Ubuntu netinstall, Tails, GParted live, FreeBSD bootonly, Supergrub 2, Windows Server 2019 evaluation, Windows 11 22H2.