How to Use 'Ventoy' to Make a Multi-Boot USB Drive

The Problem Ventoy Solves

Traditional USB installer tools like Rufus or balenaEtcher write one ISO to one drive — if you want to switch from a Windows installer to a Linux live disc, you have to reformat and rewrite the whole USB stick. If you're a sysadmin, IT tech, or just someone who keeps a "toolkit" drive around, that gets old fast. Ventoy takes a completely different approach: you install Ventoy onto the USB drive once, and after that you manage it like a regular flash drive — just drag and drop as many ISO files onto it as will fit. Boot from the drive and Ventoy shows you a menu to pick which ISO to boot, every time. No re-flashing, no reformatting, ever.

It supports an enormous range of ISOs out of the box: Windows 10/11 installers, most Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Proxmox VE, etc.), MemTest86, antivirus rescue disks, and most other bootable Linux-based utility ISOs. It works via both Legacy BIOS and UEFI boot.

Downloading and Installing Ventoy

1. Grab the latest release from the official GitHub page: github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases. Download the Windows ZIP (e.g. ventoy-1.0.99-windows.zip).
2. Extract the ZIP and run Ventoy2Disk.exe.
3. Plug in the USB drive you want to use. Back up anything on it first — this step wipes the entire drive.
4. Select your USB device from the dropdown in the Ventoy app.
5. Click Install, confirm the warning, and wait for it to finish. This only takes a minute or two since it's just writing the Ventoy boot partition, not an entire OS image.

Adding ISOs

Once Ventoy finishes installing, the drive shows up in File Explorer as a normal-looking volume (labeled "Ventoy" by default).

1. Open the drive in File Explorer.
2. Copy or drag as many .iso files onto it as you want — Windows installers, Ubuntu, Proxmox, MemTest86, whatever you need. There's no limit beyond the drive's free space.
3. You can organize them into subfolders if you like; Ventoy's boot menu will still find them.
4. Safely eject the drive when done.

Booting From the Drive

1. Plug the Ventoy USB into the target machine and boot from it — press the boot-menu key during startup (commonly F12, F11, Esc, or F9 depending on the manufacturer) and select the USB device, or set it as the first boot device in BIOS/UEFI settings.
2. Ventoy displays a text menu listing every ISO file it found on the drive.
3. Use the arrow keys to pick the one you want and press Enter. Ventoy boots it exactly as if you'd burned that single ISO to its own dedicated USB drive.

Updating Ventoy or Adding More ISOs Later

To add more ISOs, just plug the drive into any computer and copy new files onto it — no need to re-run the installer. To update Ventoy itself to a newer version, run Ventoy2Disk.exe again and use the "Update" option, which preserves your existing ISO files rather than wiping the drive (unlike the initial install).

Persistence for Linux Distros

By default, booting a Linux live ISO through Ventoy runs in a temporary, non-persistent state — any changes or files you create during that session vanish on reboot, same as booting the ISO normally. If you want a persistent Ubuntu/Debian-based session that remembers changes across boots, Ventoy supports this through a separate persistence configuration file (a .dat file paired with the ISO's filename via ventoy.json), documented on the official Ventoy site under "Plugin & Configuration." It's not required for most use cases — installer and rescue ISOs don't need persistence at all.

Troubleshooting

• An ISO doesn't appear in the boot menu: confirm the file actually has a .iso extension and isn't corrupted (check its checksum against the one published by the distro).
• An ISO appears but won't boot correctly: Ventoy maintains a compatibility list on its GitHub wiki — a small number of ISOs need special handling and aren't 100% plug-and-play.
• Secure Boot issues: recent Ventoy versions support UEFI Secure Boot directly; if you hit a Secure Boot violation, either update Ventoy to the latest release or temporarily disable Secure Boot in your BIOS/UEFI settings for that boot.

Wrap-Up

Once set up, Ventoy turns a single USB drive into a permanent, reusable toolkit — no more juggling a stack of single-purpose installer drives or re-flashing every time you need a different OS. For anyone doing repeated OS installs, hardware diagnostics, or IT support work, it's one of those tools that pays for the five minutes it takes to set up almost immediately.