this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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So over the years (decade?) I've used Ventoy a lot. For those not aware, it is basically a live USB that you can add other ISOs to to boot into those. Usually overkill but incredibly useful for those days when you need diagnostics, a simple terminal, and then to install something what you actually want.

But... it feels like I run into corner cases and issues with ventoy more often than not. Proxmox or Fedora or whatever decide to do something even slightly different and then I need to upgrade ventoy and blah blah blah. Also... I am not the most comfortable with downloading anything from Sourceforge these days. Let alone something that is going to have a LOT of power over whatever machines I provision.

So I suspect the real answer is to either set up a way to network boot (although, not all machines support that) or buy like five cheap USB drives and put them on a keychain and not over-complicate things.

But if I DID want to over-complicate them.. is there anything better than Ventoy these days?

Thanks

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Not sure if it fits what you're looking for but I usually use YUMI for multi boot situations, can't recall it giving me any issues over the years. But I don't do anything overly complex either.

Never had the need to use Ventoy myself so can't really give a good comparison but maybe others have used both & can give a better review.

PS - For what it's worth my basic toolkit is YUMI with https://www.system-rescue.org and https://www.memtest.org, that alone covers the vast majority of my diagnostics/rescue situations. But I've also added Windows 10 ISO onto the multi boot on occasion which could be useful for getting to a Windows prompt with Windows tools when needed - though I have a habit of keeping Windows on its own USB via https://rufus.ie