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

  • fl42v
    2·
    4 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·
      4 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.