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
    3·
    8 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.