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Creating a Boot Drive with Ventoy

#programming #linux #homelab

Updated 27 Dec 2024

The Problem

I have several computers in my life. Currently I have 3 laptops (2 personal, 1 for work), 3 mini PCs, 1 desktop computer that I converted into a NAS, and 3 Raspberry Pi single board computers. Most of these computers are servers that I run in my homelab which is basically just a playground for learning about IT and software development.

One of the most important steps in standing up a new server is installing the operating system (OS). This is a tedious process that often involves flashing a USB drive with the disk image (ISO) of your desired operating system, an action that requires reformatting and erasing the drive. A lot of people have old 16GB or 32GB flash drives laying around which work great for this task since most operating systems are less than 32GB in total size. Unfortunately, I don't have a bunch of old, small flash drives that I can dedicate for burning disk images.

And that's where Ventoy comes in! Ventoy is a free and open-source utility used for creating bootable USB media storage devices. It allows you to add multiple different operating system images to one USB drive and boot from them directly without reformatting the drive each time. At the moment, I have a single USB drive that contains isos for Arch Linux, Ubuntu Server, and Proxmox VE.

The Solution

Here's how I installed it:

  1. Go to the Ventoy official website and download the latest version for your operating system. I download the ventoy-1.0.99-linux.tar.gz file as I was doing this from a linux machine.
  2. I then ran sha256sum ventoy-1.0.99-linux.tar.gz from the directory that contained my downloaded file. You'll want to compare the output of that command to the SHA-256 checksum for the file you downloaded. This will usually be listed alongside the download link or in a separate text file.
  3. I then inserted the USB drive I wanted to use as my Ventoy drive. I ran lsblk to identify it. In my case, the drive was called sda. I needed to mount it so I ran the following commands: the first creates a new directory for mounting the partition and the second mounts the partition:
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/usb1
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb1

This is what I saw after running lsblk

NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda                         8:16   1 116.1G  0 disk
└─sda1                      8:17   1 116.1G  0 part /mnt/usb1
  1. I then expanded the Ventoy tarball and navigated into the new ventoy-1.0.99 directory:
tar -xzf ventoy-1.0.99-linux.tar.gz 
cd ventoy-1.0.99
  1. Lastly, I ran the Ventoy install script:
sudo ./Ventoy2Disk.sh -i /dev/sda

Conclusion

If everything went well, you should have a newly formatted /dev/sda drive with a Ventoy partition mounted at /mnt/usb1. From here, you can copy as many isos as you want to the Ventoy partition. If you're like, you'll also label your dedicated "Ventoy" drive appropriately so you don't get it mixed up with others.