| Ventoy | |
| Released: | 5 April 2020 |
| Developer: | Hailong Sun (aka longpanda) |
| Operating System: | Cross-platform (Windows, Linux) |
| License: | GPLv3+ License |
| Discontinued: | unknown (on hold) |
Ventoy is a free and open-source utility used for creating bootable usb media storage device with files such as .iso, .wim, .img, .vhd(x), and . Once Ventoy is installed onto a USB drive, there is no need to reformat the disk to update it with new installation files; it is enough to copy the .iso,,,, or file(s) to the USB drive and boot from them directly.[1] [2] [3] Ventoy will present the user with a boot menu to select one of these files. Currently, the project has been on hold in the absence of the main developer longpanda since June, 2024. Some users expressed fear of discontinuation of the project on the official forum,[4] with no affirmation from the developer.
Ventoy can be installed on a USB flash drive, local disk, solid-state drive (SSD, NVMe), or SD card and it will directly boot from the selected .iso,,,, or file(s) added. Ventoy does not extract the image file(s) to the USB drive, but uses them directly, as it has the unzipping facility and does so during the installation. It is possible to place multiple ISO images on a single device and select the image to boot from the menu displayed just after Ventoy boots.
MBR and GPT partition styles, x86 Legacy BIOS and various UEFI boot methods (including persistence) are supported. ISO files larger than 4 GB can be used. Ventoy supports various operating system boot and installation ISO files, including Windows 7 and later, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora and more than a hundred other Linux distributions; various Unix releases, VMware, Citrix XenServer, etc. have also been tested.[5] Ventoy isn't recommended on the openSUSE wiki, since there are reports of boot issues by the users [6]