Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 12, 2022

Multiple Linux Live CDs on a single USB Drive

Filed under: Computer Tips,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:55 PM

Portable Boot disks are a life saver for a techie and I usually carry one with me most of the time (Its part of my keychain 🙂 ) However, the issue I would face was that I could only carry one live CD at a time on a USB stick and if I wanted another one then I would either have to search for the pendrive where I had already installed it or burn another one to the drive which was annoying, especially when I had to switch between OS’s frequently.

So I started searching for an alternative, something similar to the Ultimate Boot CD that allowed you to have multiple diagnostic tools on a CD but for Live Distros and installation media. Tried a bunch of ways but the easiest way I found was to use Ventoy to create a bootable USB.

You can download Ventoy from their GitHub Releases page, and the installation of the tool is as easy as extracting the file to a folder on your system and then running the correct executable for your system (They have executable’s for all architectures). Once you run the file as root, select the USB disk you want to use and click install. It takes about a minute for the software to install on the drive and once completed, it creates two partitions on the disk. The first partition named VTOYEFI is reserved for the boot files by Ventoy so ensure that you don’t change anything in that partition.

The second partition called Ventoy, is an exFAT partition and this is where we will copy all the ISO files for the distributions we want the disk to support. Installing a new OS/Tool/CD is as simple as copying the ISO file for the CD on to the partition. Once we have copied the files to the partition all you have to do is unmount the partition and your new disk is ready to use.

I installed the Debian Installer, Kali Live CD and Kali Installed on a 8GB drive with no issues. When I boot from the disk, I get a menu asking me to select the ISO I want to boot into and then the system boots into the boot menu for that image. So now I can carry one pen-drive with all the OS’s I would need to troubleshoot a system or reinstall the OS. I think you should be able to boot into windows installer as well using this method but I haven’t tried it yet so can’t confirm for sure.

Well, this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

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