So over the years (decade?) I’ve used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want.

But… it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also… I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision.

So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things.

But if I DID want to over-complicate them… is there anything better than Ventoy these days?

Thanks

  • sgh
    102·
    9 months ago

    Take a look at the IODD ST400.

    It’s a hardware solution to your problem: you put multiple isos on an ssd, plug your ssd into the ST400, then plug the ST400 into the computer you want to live boot from (through USB).

    From the ST400 you can quickly swap the active ISO, and it acts like a virtual DVD drive to the target computer, and you’re basically ejecting and inserting a new DVD every time you do so.

    You can also mount it for RW operations (ie. for inserting new ISOs without having to remove the SSD), for which it acts like a regular usb disk - but I recommend using it usually in RO mode to avoid data corruption.

    It’s not that user friendly, but once you get used to it, it’s a perfect multiboot tool to have in your belt.

    • fl42v
      2·
      9 months ago

      I have an older clone by zalman, and it’s meh. First of all, it only works with either fat32 or NTFS (although, I haven’t checked exfat), and you need to flash different firmware to change the compatible fs. Also, if the drive has multiple partitions, the last one becomes unmountable using this thingy (mismatch in real size and that advertised by the superblock, as far as I remember).

      Can the newer models ext4 at least?

      • sgh
        3·
        9 months ago

        I have been using exfat since it has support for big ISOs and is compatible with Linux.

        The ST400 does NOT support ext4, but I didn’t care much: I wanted a partition scheme that was accessible from both Windows and Linux.

        I don’t recall ever having to change the firmware for that, nor for NTFS which I have used the very first time when testing it out.

        For my use case, I am using a cheap 120G ssd on which I only keep ISOs, so I never found myself needing multiple partitions…

        Edit: The documentation does say that it supports multiple partitions, but again, I never tested that out, so YMMV…

        Hope this helps.