My most McGyvered solution to create a bootable USB was to take a really old Android phone and make it into one. Worked surprisingly well, actually.
Oh damn, would not have expected that to work. The worst hack I ever used is when I helped a friend install Linux who didn’t have any spare (working) USB drives around. He did have a spare SSD in his PC however, so I ended up flashing the ISO to that.
Back in the day: Installing MS Office with all the bells and whistles. I think it was 26 disks.
Insert disk 12…
My first Linux experience was Redhat with floppies as well.
What fun.
sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of you with my apple juice “How did you get urgent security and application updates Grandpa?”
From a security perspective its hard to go wrong with physical disks
What’s ventoy?
a thing you install in a usb stick that allows you to have multiple bootable isos
like you can have the mint and arch isos on the same drive and etc
Oh, I always partitioned when I needed to do that. This seems easier though, thanks!
Is it like Rufus but fancier?
Ventoy is an OS.
It’s a live Linux that boots from the USB stick you format/image with the ventoy tool. The rest of the space on the USB stick is configured to be essentially a standard USB drive.
The live Linux’s sole purpose is to boot another image stored on the USB stick.So, once you have "ventoy"d a usb stick, you can plonk gparted live iso, Ubuntu, Debian, Eos, W10, W11… whatever isos you want. When you boot from that USB stick, you get the ventoy menu screen and select the iso you want it to continue to boot.
Basically, a bootloader on a usb stick
Ventoy should become more popular with sysadmin as having your entire recovery stack on a single usb is a good quality of life change
Oh yeh, saved my skin a few times.
And you can use it like a normal USB stick once your OS is up, so you can have some installers on there to speed things up
Ventoy is just the grub bootloader.
Oh that’s pretty slick thank you for the info
Other useful bootable tools are MS DaRT and Hirens Boot Disc (is that still a thing? Haven’t used it in a while.)
The drive is also still usable for bulk storage, so a big one is still a great option. I’ve got it set up on a nice small form factor 256GB usb.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.
Its like grub but for your iso’s. You install ventoy, drag your iso’s into the ventoy folder and bam you got a grub like selection of all your iso’s
If you have a dvd drive in your PC, you are officially old. I have one, blu ray even. Haven’t used it in years. It’s not even wired up atm.
I have an optical drive in 3 of my machines. I’m not old
Not old, either. My old desktop that I gave to my younger brother has an optical drive. Whenever I have spare money laying around to build and a place to put a desktop, it’s going to have an optical drive. Not having one, at least somewhat reachable makes me anxious. I use it probably less than once a quarter, more like twice yearly, but when I need it, I need it.
Honestly, a better solution would be an open-source IODD-type device, because sometimes I still meet old devices which do boot via USB DVD drives, but not flash drives.
But Ventoy is a second solid choice, especially with newer devices, where such limitations are basically non-existent :)
My micro SD Card in the USB Adapter needs 2 vor 3 tries
You shouldn’t eat micro SD cards, no matter how much it turns you on.
Yummy
Better than eating a full sized SD card, at least.
If you don’t have a floppy disk to boot into the optimal memory configuration for your game, what are you even doing with your life?
Me in the corner with netboot.xyz: “I am four parallel universes ahead of you”
