A crucial step when reinstalling Windows or evaluating any Linux distro on bare metal is transferring its ISO image to a USB drive. At this point we recommend Rufus, our favorite tool for the job, but there are also other free and highly compatible options. However, when your USB drive or external unit has spare capacity, it’s not a bad idea to load and boot multiple ISO images. The key is to use the Ventoy application, with support for more than 850 images.
Keeping a folder with ISO images of the main operating systems is an excellent strategy for any user, as it saves a lot of time by avoiding redundant downloads and not relying on online resources. Transferring their content to a USB drive takes a few minutes, and once they are installed on the machine, its updaters should take care of obtaining any necessary hotfix or patch.
Now, that is very effective when we talk about a single operating system, but it can become tedious if we want to test (for example) more than one Linux distro on a computer. Using multiple USB drives is just a brute-force solution; however, with a 64 or 128 GB drive we could easily store dozens of images. In other words, what we are looking for is a way to boot multiple ISO images from a single USB drive, and that is where Ventoy comes in.
How to Boot Multiple ISO Images with Ventoy
Fortunately, Ventoy is very easy to use: it all starts with a double click on its executable, then we choose the USB drive from the list (if you have to connect it, you’ll need to press Refresh for it to appear), and press “Install”. Once the process is finished and Ventoy’s presence on the drive is confirmed, the rest is reduced to opening your favorite file manager and copying the ISO images into the USB drive (the .iso files directly, without processing or decompressing).
If we want to use a newer version of the ISO image, it is enough to delete the previous one and copy the new file. Ventoy is compatible with UEFI or traditional BIOS computers, allows loading images larger than 4 GB, and on the official page we can find a long list of images that have already been tested. At the time of writing, there are more than 850 images, with a compatibility higher than 90 percent among the distros documented under DistroWatch.
Ventoy was recently updated, with its latest version at 1.0.74, and luckily it has managed to eliminate the vast majority of its bugs. Also, it is an open source project, and anyone interested can study its code more closely on GitHub. We have tested it on several occasions, and it worked perfectly even with more ‘obscure’ ISO images like Android-x86. Download a copy!
Official site and download: Click here
