Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy.
You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites.
Ventoy is indeed one of the best (if not THE best) tool for this. Even if it does not support absolutely everything (last time I checked), it is by far the most hassle free and sure-fire solution.
For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004. I honestly don't care to remember all the odd issues/failures I've encountered during those 17 years. The situation certainly got better/easier with the years, but it can still be a gamble if an odd Linux distro will actually boot successfully from USB or not.
Until I discovered Ventoy, about a year or two ago, I would always be hesitant to recommend running Linux from USB, unless I knew the exact setup (or it involved someone with a decent technical skills).
Ventoy is great!!! I'd recommend everyone to at least have a look at it. It's one of the very few tools I endorse without any hesitation or reservation.
I am in no way personally involved with Ventoy, nor do I have a stake in it. I just love the tool for what it is.
I have a couple of old dusty laptops at work, that I think are just old enough to have 32bit uefi (or bios?) and cpu with 64bit support. Are there any current distros that should work, I wonder?
I suppose I could dig up an old Debian Iso-but I'd prefer something with a recent-ish kernel (wireguard) and a half-secure libssl and opensshd.
Hm, maybe openbsd (current) still has support?
Ed: I've been doing Linux installs since the 90s... Around kernel 1.3 or there abouts - but it's been a while since dipped my toes in 32bit/hybrid x86 systems. .
> For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004.
Could you point to some good sources that explain in detail the whole "bootable USB" world? It seems it's always a hassle to get right, especially when preparing a Windows bootable USB.
rufus is good for preparing a windows bootable usb with uefi boot (so you can later enable secure boot, after install), so stick to that. ventoy is great, might be better than rufus, when you want multiple os's on a stick, but for the average person it's also way more complex than rufus. (rufus only works on windows tough)
For the benefit of those who may not know, this has been possible (by way of Grub2) with many Linux distros for a while now without custom software. Typically you just add extra boot arguments that point to the iso and flag that booting from it is desired.
Unfortunately the required arguments tend to be poorly documented and quite specific to each distro. This looks like a neat tool that's sidestepping that issue. If anyone knows of a good resource that documents these boot arguments for a range of distros, please share!
Assuming you loopback mount the ISO, I think these are the major args... fill in the "..." wherever you see them:
# Ubuntu
linux .../vmlinuz boot=casper file=.../ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=...
initrd ...
# Arch
linux .../vmlinuz img_dev=... img_loop=... earlymodules=loop
initrd ..._ucode.img .../archiso.img
# Kali
linux ... boot=live components findiso=... # noautomount
initrd ...
# GParted
linux ... boot=live union=overlay config components toram=....squashfs findiso=...
initrd ...
In general you'll have to boot the kernels directly as shown above. Using the built-in GRUB menus won't work in many cases. Which makes it difficult to make these future-proof.
You'll also want to make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware as necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.
Best of luck getting a robust boot menu script going. Expect to spend weeks if not months on it if you're new to GRUB scripts/components.
You can also add toram to copy the entire squashfs root to memory. This way you get better performance, and don't need to keep your USB disk plugged in.
Are you referring to grub2iso[1]? If so, I was never able to make it work: either the ISO is too large (IIRC, in the old days it needed to load the full ISO to memory), or, if it did boot, the kernel wouldn't find the ISO ("virtual drive") itself.
I only got it to work with simple things that load fully from RAM -- say, debian-installer, which only requires kernel+initrd.
It has to be simple and reliable. If it's only one of them, I would rather carry an extra USB stick which I can always format (I do).
And make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware if necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.
I just wrote Ventoy to my megastick, wrote FreeBSD and Debian Install images, and it works. Debian Bullseye install image complains about low-memory mode, but the booted machine had >500MB still available. Abstraction breaks somewhere, I would love to know why/how.
Without diving into the source code. :) Has anyone seen architecture/design documents on how it actually mounts the ISO file and "boots" from it? What does prevent "the other 10%" from not working?
I looked through the docs, found these so far:
Memdisk[1] section mentions:
> In normal mode, Ventoy will only read the iso file at booting time, and only read the content needed for boot.
Ventoy Compatible?[2] mentions a hook. What does this mean?
> Once Ventoy treats the iso file as Ventoy Compatible, it will just make the virtual disk and will not do the hook.
A great software solution. I had a look and once Linux boots it actually uses devicemapper to map a dm device to the raw sectors containing the iso which it extracts (as it may be fragmented) to feed to dmsetup. Kinda crazy.
There is also a couple of hardware projects that to that in hardware. I used the ISOstick for many years.
You can also PXE NetBoot a lot of installers with dynamic menu selection - see http://netboot.xyz
What a great tool! There goes my collection of small old 1-8 GB USB thumb drives, just use a big one for installs.
A nice companion could be a small *PI like board with a script that scans repositories for iso updates then downloads them using torrent to avoid taxing the servers too much, then when necessary (but not more than once every N days to avoid wearing the memory) updates the dongle automatically overnight. Just stick the dongle when you're back at home and the next morning if necessary it is updated to the latest images.
Another vote for ventoy. Means I can use my large fast USB drive (actually an mSATA SSD pulled from a broken laptop, in an adapter) as a collection of boot media while keeping the rest of the space for other use. I don't need to boot from a distro CD often these day, but when I do it is nice that it is much faster than my other USB sticks, more convenient than carrying a few (Debian, Ubuntu, psSense, Kali, ...) around, and more convenient to update when I need something new or otherwise specific for the situation.
Rufus has other use cases: imaging distros for Raspberry Pi, and (especially handy) reformat HFS, APFS and Ext4 pendrives for FAT or NTFS under Windows without jumping through hoops.
Rufus is just straight-up better, though? It's smaller, faster, more configurable, doesn't require installation, doesn't opt you in to analytics (wtf are they even analyzing?), and doesn't advertise the developer's other projects.
Even ignoring those last two, which just seem gross, running an entire web browser to accomplish the same thing as a 1MB native application is like using an anvil as a hammer. Yeah, it'll work, but why?
I don’t know if it’s better; it seems like it could easily be as good, but I’ll check it out the first time Etcher fails to make a working flash drive.
Besides that, every single of maybe a few dozen times i tried it, it said checksum error after verification. On different systems, with different media. Interestingly there were no errors in reality. I dismissed it as a well meaning toy for dummies. Or maybe data gathering spyware.
Thouroughly unimpressed with it and any project recommending or even insisting on using it.
Rufus has made multiple unbootable drives in the years that I've used it. Etcher has yet to made one and I used to flash drives constantly - multiple daily - until I switched to Ventoy which is the way forward now.
I wouldn't say "far better". It's different. Rufus is superb for specific tasks.
I especially like the interface, including the automatic download of the current Windows 10 ISO. I find the whole process (and more importantly, walking others through the process) a breeze.
I like the cheat mode codes that let me walk people through tasks easily, but still retaining functionality I want for myself.
https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#Power_keysCheat_mo...
Alt+E being one that I use myself, but absolutely would not want enabled for a novice user.
That's not to take anything away from Ventoy (although I'm an IODD user myself). Just saying one is better or worse doesn't feel fair to me.
I know back in the day, there was a very similar tool called SARDU [0]. It is closed source from what I know, so if that was your breaking point, fair enough.
EDIT: There have also been YUMI and Easy2Boot in a similar vein before Ventoy.
For ages, there have been Zalman enclosures for making ISO-based multi-bootable external HDDs/SSDs working this way and on a lower level. And iodd which are essentially the same (AFAIK Zalman rebranded them).
I tried Ventoy several months ago, and go back to Rufus because it can’t boot EndeavourOS. That’s weird because every comment I saw about Ventoy is positive.
This is anecdotal. I've been able to successfully install boot and install EndeavourOS with Ventoy. I've not done anything special - just install Ventoy "sh ./Ventoy2disk.sh -i /dev/sdb", copied the iso over and booted.
Just tried it because it seem great and it booted parted magic fine but trying to boot on W10 20H2 iso just got me stuck on a black window inside ventoy.
Too bad because I'd really like to have a single USB with everything I could really carry around instead of a bunch of small one.
FWIW I couldn’t get Ventoy working a while back, from MacOS, trying to boot to a Windows ISO for a bootcamp installation. That said, fully appreciate this is a tricky endeavour at the best of times!
The only reason I even keep an old Windows based laptop around for was to burn ISO’s to flash drives with Rufus for repairing computers of friends and family members.
I use Ventoy on a 500 GB portable SSD. I have Windows 10, FreeBSD, and multiple versions of each distro on it just in case. It even works with TempleOS.
All it needs now is some way to keep persistent files and I'll never need another thumb drive to install an OS.
Personally and subjective this rings quite some alarm bells for me, seems just a bit sketchy and in any way really young, so not as much time out on the field and thus possibly not as much bugs shaken out...
> Multiple installs on the same device are not supported.
If one is limited to a single usb-stick per ISO, it's just easier to dd the installation image: run it the way it's (hopefully[x]) been tested by the vendors.
Ventoy is a different ballgame: drag & drop ISO file and boot from it. I tested it this morning with 3 things I carry around myself (debian-live, debian-installer, freebsd release installer), and it worked. 1 stick instead of 3, and I still have the remaining exFAT partition for other things. And a spare encrypted partition if I wanted to (I don't).
Regarding bugs -- it works or it doesn't for your distribution. I think it's remarkable what this, seemingly single developer, has achieved over a bit more than a year[2].
It is similar though, but yes it misses the "more ISOs" part, which I actually find weird because at that point that would be almost cheap to do - that's why I did not reverified that bit, sorry.
Unetbootin either dumps the raw ISO directly to the block device or, in the case of Windows, extracts it to an exFAT partition. Ventoy doesn't require you to extract or dump the ISOs at all, which is where the real beauty of it lies.
You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy