Looking for recommendations for a versatile USB stick with Ventoy. I’m trying to create the “perfect, all-in-all” USB stick using Ventoy to store various ISOs and rescue tools. So far, I have the following ISOs:
- Arch
- OpenSuse TW
- NixOS
- Bazzite + AuroraDX
- Win10 ISO
- Clonezilla
I’m looking for suggestions on additional ISOs or tools that are compatible with Ventoy. What do you recommend adding to make my USB stick to make it more useful?
I work in a PC repair shop and I run my tool stick on this way.
- Acronis (can clone to reduced size drives unlike clonezilla which can only clone to equal or bigger)
- MemTest86 & MemTest86+ (+ is the FOSS one. Recommend both because sometimes one won’t work)
- Don’t forget that you can put other stuff in a Ventoy, not just .isos. I have shitlods of utilities in a folder beside all the .isos.
- Tons more but I just woke up for work. I will make this list much longer when I get there of I can remember to
I’m an arch user, and also have a small proxmox based homelab. I always have a live Ubuntu around, the latest desktop version available. Good for troubleshooting. Also, latest proxmox, opnsense, pfsense, debian.
Additionally, I have a small USB drive on my keychain with both USB C and USB A, where I keep some encrypted backups of important stuff, and I can access that from both my laptop and my phone.
Ventoy with Arch and Rescue bootable images. And a portable cross platform encryption tool just in case.
Can you give us some names? Sounds intriguing
Rescue image: SystemRescue
Portable Encryption Tool: Picocrypt
Looking at my Ventoy stick i have multiple folders for different OS:
Arch_Based:
- CachyOS
- Garuda
Debian_Based:
- Debian Bookworm
- Mint
- Zorin OS
Fedora_Based:
- Fedora Silverblue
- Nobara
GamingBox
- Bazzite
- ChimeraOS
ServerOS:
- Ubuntu Server
- TrueNAS Scale
Windows:
- Tiny10
- Tiny11
Tools:
- Avira Rescue System
- SuperGrub2
- UBCD
Thanks for sharing! What size is your usb-stick?
It’s a 64GB stick and i manually keep it in sync with my netbootxyz instance
Ohhh I’ve meant to try out netbootxyz for a while now, thanks for the reminder!
you’re welcome!
to be fair, it’s more of a gimmick when using it in your home. I have a notebook that i use to test out new distros on and i can hook it up to my LAN and quickly install something without whipping out the USB stick.
Also the mini gaming pc hooked to my TV is a victim of being reinstalled every couple months after i tinker around too much.
It’s like…maybe like an eagle or something?
Back to the days I was fixing a lot of computers of friends and relatives, my Swiss army knife of Linux was https://www.system-rescue.org/
Very lightweight but with a full set of recovery tools. I’ve tried it recently and I still find it up to the expectations.
I’ve also used a fair amount of https://clonezilla.org/ to (re)store images of freshly installed OSes (mostly windows XP and 7 to give you an idea of the timeframe) for people who I know would have messed up faster.
Arch Linu, Kubuntu, Supergrub, Tails, Kali, Windows
Do yourself a favor and skip the USB drive - they are ridiculously slow compared to a compact external SSD. I found a cheap m.2 enclosure on Amazon and put an old SSD in it and the speed difference is breathtaking.
My SSD has a bunch of Linux distros grouped into folders along with Windows 10 & 11, every macOS from 10.13 to present, along with Rescuezilla, Hiren’s and a few others I can’t remember at the moment.
Rescuezilla was my #1 go-to during my days of distro hopping. Makes it super easy to try out a distro on bare metal instead of a VM.
How do you select which one to boot?
I use Ventoy to boot everything but macOS. Those installers need their own partitions on the SSD.
Ventoy
Win10 LTSC, Win 11 LTSC, Win 7 MiniOS ISOs, Linux Mint Cinnamon, Linus Mont XFCE and Pop!_OS.
I keep an iodd mini with all the current and past repair isos. Then I have a folder.i keep the tooling income.upmwoth for various repair or automation stuff. I got a batch script (need to move to winger) to auto install all my standard day one software. On mobile otherwise I would pull up the list and throw it in here. If you are curious let me know and I’ll reply with the list when I get time.
- Win10
- Win11
- Fedora
- Fedora Server
- Hirens
What’s on my USB stick you ask… A bunch of random shit I haven’t touched for 8 years so I have no idea what it is and it’s probably outdated, but I’d be damned if that usb stick is not In my keychain because “I might need it one day”
I don’t keep a Swiss army knife set of distros anymore. I put tumbleweed on a USB. It’s rolling so I update it when I plug it in, then do what I need to do.
I used to have a USB with Ubuntu LTS and whatever the newest Ubuntu was. Then another would get something else that I needed/wanted. I always ended up wiping the drive and adding the newest release every single time. I was always out of date by the time I needed one of them for boot repair or something. This was also a time when persistence… Wasn’t very persistent. With tumbleweed I can install whatever I need and it’s there next time. I’m sure you can do the same with any other rolling release, but tumbleweed is in my opinion on par stability-wise with incremental distros. It’s my first grab whenever I need to check a PC. If I need another distro or boot USB, I can make it from this one with a second USB. I suppose the only thing I can’t do is make a bootable USB if the computer I’m on can’t access the Internet
Inside Ventoy: SystemRescue, Clonezilla, Debian netinstall, Ubuntu netinstall, Tails, GParted live, FreeBSD bootonly, Supergrub 2, Windows Server 2019 evaluation, Windows 11 22H2.
