How to create a multiboot USB on Linux

Endrit Qerreti

Endrit Qerreti

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a multiboot USB on Linux and Windows. Have you ever wanted to have multiple ISOs on a single USB and be able to boot to any operating system without having to reformat your USB flash drive any time you want to boot to another OS? Yes, then this tutorial is for you.

Ventoy allows you to use one single USB flash drive to boot multiple operating systems, so all you need is one single flash drive and enough storage for all ISOs that you want to have on your device.

What is Ventoy?

Ventoy is an open source app that you can use to create a multiboot USB disk by simply clicking one button.

Using ventoy it's very easy, follow the steps below how to download and use it

Step 1 - Download Ventoy

In this tutorial i'm using Linux mint. However, the installation process is same on both Linux and Windows.

Ventoy files are hosted on github so click the link below to download it

https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases

Simply click over the ventoy-1.0.61-linux.tar.gz and the download will start

Step 2 - Extract ventoy-1.0.61-linux.tar.gz

Once you have downloaded the tar.gz file, extract it to any folder where you want.

Step 3 - Install Ventoy on your Device

Double click to VentoyGUI.x86_64 to launch ventoy gui if your system is 64bit, if your system is 32bit then you need to launch VentoyGUI.i386

Next you need to plug in the usb flash drive. If the USB device is not showing up on the Device dropdown box on Ventoy click the refresh button (green button) and the usb should show up.

As you can see on the screenshot below, now the USB device is showing up and you can move on to next step

Once the usb device is listed on device's box then proceed with the installation of Ventoy by clicking the Install button.

Next, confirm by clicking the OK button

Now all you need to do is wait for the ventoy to finish the installation

Once Ventoy has been installed on your usb flash drive you can move on to the next step which is copy pasting/moving the ISO(s) to your usb.

Step 4 - Copy ISOs to your USB flash drive

Once Ventoy has been installed on your usb device, all you have to do now is copying the ISOs that you want to use on your device. There's no other software or anything else needed to do this , so simply copy the iso file and paste it on your flash drive.

Step 5 - Boot from your USB device

On this step you need to plug in the usb device on your computer and simply boot from it. And you should see the Ventoy Window from where you can choose which Operating System you want to boot into.

Note: You can also use the command line app to install ventoy on your device if GUI doesn't run on your computer.

Conclusion

In this tutorial you learned how to create a multiboot USB flash drive by using Ventoy - an open source software for creating a bootable usb with multiple different Operating Systems or images on it.