How to Make a Bootable USB with Ventoy (Many ISOs, One Drive)

Install once, then copy image files onto the stick like ordinary documents. No reflashing every time you switch to another installer image.

The classic way to build a bootable stick is one image per drive, rewritten and wiped on every use. Ventoy inverts that: a small bootloader is installed once, then you simply copy image files onto the drive. When you boot from it, you choose which image to start.

What you need

• A USB drive of 8 GB or more. Use 32 GB or larger if you plan to keep several installer and rescue images on it at once.
• The Ventoy tool itself, which you run from Windows or from a Linux system.
• The image files you want to boot, checked against published checksums before you trust them.
• A second, ordinary stick with a single installer as a fallback. One drive is never a plan.

Install Ventoy on the drive

1. Back up anything stored on the USB drive first. Installing the bootloader erases it.
2. Run the Ventoy tool as administrator, connect the drive and select it in the device list. Check the listed capacity twice; picking the wrong disk is the one unrecoverable mistake here.
3. Choose the partition style for the machines you will boot. Modern UEFI systems want the newer scheme; older hardware sometimes needs the legacy one, and some ISOs only boot in one of the two modes.
4. Click install, accept the confirmation warning and wait for it to finish. Do not unplug the drive during this step.
5. Open the drive in Explorer. You will see a large data partition and the small boot partition. Copy image files to the large one, folders are fine.

Boot from it

1. Plug the drive into the target machine and open its boot menu key at power-on, usually one of the function keys or escape.
2. Pick the USB entry in UEFI mode for modern systems. If the machine refuses to boot, enable the Secure Boot support option inside the Ventoy menu and try again.
3. In the Ventoy boot menu, select an image with the arrow keys and press enter to start it normally.
4. If an image fails to boot, try the alternate mode the menu offers for that entry, and check that the image is not corrupted.

Practical notes

The data partition uses a filesystem that handles single files larger than 4 GB, so large multi-part images fit without splitting. Files you keep on the drive survive when you update the bootloader in place with the tool's update function, so you do not lose your ISO collection on a version bump. Use a USB 3 port and a decent stick: cheap drives with slow controllers can take an hour to write a large image and then boot unreliably.

Safety habits

Store only images from vendors you trust, verify each one's checksum before copying, and keep the stick out of the hands of anyone who might boot it on a machine with sensitive data — a multi-image rescue drive is also a multi-image attack drive in the wrong hands.