Whenever you want to boot from a new version of Windows 10, you have to download the Windows 10 ISO file and then create a bootable USB drive using a tool like Rufus. But Rufus formats your USB drive each time you use it to create bootable USB drives followed by extracting and copying of the ISO image files to the USB drive. This means that you lose all the files previously stored on that drive and the process becomes a bit longer because extraction and copying might take a very long time.
Ventoy can save you from formatting your USB drives again and again and still gives you a perfectly working bootable USB drive. It uses a different approach – it installs a GRUB bootloader to your USB drive that uses ISOboot to boot directly from the ISO files that you have copied to your USB drive. This way, you format your USB drive only once and afterwards you can just copy ISO files to that USB drive and it will be ready to boot directly from that ISO file.
You begin by launching Ventoy2Disk.exe tool. This tool can format your USB drive and installs the GRUB based bootloader on it. After formatting is complete, your USB drive will have two partitions one for the bootloader and another for storing ISO files. In Windows File Explorer, you will see only one partition formatted using exFAT file system.
Now all you have to do is copy any Windows or Linux ISO file to your USB drive. There is no need to extract any file. At the moment, it supports more than 160 different ISO image files belonging to Windows and Linux. It supports booting using both MBR and UEFI.
We experimented with Ventoy and were able to use it to boot into Puppy Linux, Slax Linux, and Windows 10. But It took longer to boot for Windows 10 than it should have taken using the normal way.
Ventoy certainly makes life much easier for people who want to have bootable USB drives for multiple operating systems. Just by copying the ISO to the USB drive will be enough. But it does not always work, does not support many ISO images (such as ReactOS) and does not offer any way to uninstall itself from the USB drive. Perhaps in the future versions, these features might be available.
You can download Ventoy from https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases.
Website blocked: http://www.ventoy.net
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocked this website because it may contain malware activity.
Noticed the above. Is it valid?
Perhaps because it repartitions, adds GRUB and makes changes to EFI – and yet is not digitally signed!
Bitdefender and Panda Antivirus don’t detect anything.
I changed the link to GitHub.