One Thumb Drive For Multiple ISOs

so how many USB thumb drives do you have laying around that you know are bootable but you're just not sure what's on them today we're going to solve that problem stay tuned [Music] okay is this one Windows 11 or is this one Windows 11 and is it 21 H2 or 22 H2 how many of you guys have this problem you have a stack of USB drives and you know these USB drives either have a version of Windows on them or some other bootable media but you're just not sure exactly what it is I've had this problem for a really long time I typically keep thumb drives with at least a couple different versions of Windows 10 and now I have a thumb drive for Windows 11 too this doesn't even count all of the other bootable media I have like I have a thumb drive for CD I also have one for partition magic I have a few for partition magic actually because some computers aren't bootable off of the new version so I have to keep the old version around for older systems I've gotten to the point to where I keep USB drives in certain spots in my shop so I know what's on them just to the right hand side of my monitor I have these two USB drives right here these have the latest version of Windows 10 on it as well as typically an older version I like to keep 2004. the reason why I like to keep 2004 is because I found that some Windows 7 systems don't like to update to the latest version of Windows 10. so when I have a problem I'll update the system to 2004 and then when I'm done with that I'll go ahead and update it to 22h whatever the latest version is then over on the other side of my monitor stand I have a USB drive that has part Edition Magic on it this one right here this is actually my daily USB drive that I'd keep in my pocket most of the time then on the right hand side of the elevated portion of my tech bench I also keep this thumb drive which has hiron's boot CD on it however all the way over to the left hand side of my elevated portion of my tech bench I keep these two thumb drives that have a Cronus on them for when I need to clone a hard drive you can kind of see the pattern here can't you then the rest of these USB drives have different versions of Windows 11 some of them I'm sure have Windows 10 on them as well to be honest with you I have no idea somewhere in this stack of USB drives is the leaked Windows 11 beta I kind of wanted to hang on to that one for you know prosperity's sake but I don't know where it is so that's where this drive comes in this is a 64 gig USB 3 thumb drive that has all of this on it and today okay I'm going to show you how to make one of these for yourself the way I was able to do this was with an open source program called ventoy This is a free and open source tool that allows you to throw ISO files onto a thumb drive and boot directly to them so you know what let me show you how to set it up yeah we remember what these are now I want a nuke one ah okay so the first thing you need to do is get ventoy to do that you just open up your browser and go to their website and click on the download link from the download link you want to choose which version you want they make this for Linux as well as Windows I'm going to go ahead and grab the windows version here and then that will reroute you to the GitHub page for ventoy so we scroll down and essentially do the same thing we want the windows zip right here so once it downloads we're going to go ahead and open it up and then from here we want to go ahead and take this folder I'm just going to drag it off and drop it onto my desktop get rid of some of these windows that we have open right here and now that we have this here we're going to open it up and we're going to go into the ventoi to disk application right here and once we click on that it's going to give us our user account control go ahead and hit yes and then it's going to open up this little program right here and all you want to do is select the disk that you want to use the USB thumb drive now just remember that the data that is on the USB drive that you're going to use is going to be destroyed so make sure to use a USB thumb drive that doesn't have important data on it because you could lose it anyway let's get back to it and then from this point all you do is go ahead and push the install button it'll tell you it's going to format the drive and everything on the drive will be lost so we're going to hit OK and it double checks to make sure you know that everything on this drive is going to be destroyed so go ahead and confirm and hit yes and it'll go through the process of setting the drive up and it's just going to take a second to set it up shouldn't take too long at all because it doesn't really copy all that much to the disk and that's it there you go ventoy has been successfully installed on the drive so once it's installed you can see here and it shows what version of ventoy is on the drive that you're actually using at the time and it looks like if a new version of ventoy comes out you can actually update an existing drive just by hitting the update button and hopefully that won't destroy the data on the drive so if you use the drive for other things as well but you know you'll have to play around with it and see how that works for you once we have it installed this isn't the last step there's one more thing that we have to do so I'm going to go ahead and close this I'm going to go into this PC and you can see right here that we have a new Drive called ventoy this is our thumb drive right here so we're going to go ahead and open that up and at this point all you have to do is throw in some ISO files and you can start booting from them however at this point I'm going to switch over to the USB drive that I made myself because I have several different versions of Windows on this and I want to show you how I organize this and why I did it this way okay so to do this go ahead and pull the USB drive out that you have in there and I'm going to go ahead and plug my old one in here you're going to get an auto play right here which is essentially the boot partition to the USB drive that you made but if you click over to this PC you can see that you have two different partitions and that's what ventoy does when it creates this disc originally it creates a boot partition and then the data partition and as you can see my data partition is pretty full so we're going to go ahead and open that up and you can see here that I created a folder called ISO to try to kind of organize this a little bit better and when you open that you can see that I have three different isos in the iso folder I've got hyruens boot CD and I've got the latest version of Windows 10 and 11. I also have a partition magic folder which if you open that up you can see two different versions of partition magic and then if we go back into the iso folder and go into older Windows builds I have several different old builds of Windows everything from 21h2 for Windows 11 all the way down to 1909 and 2004 for Windows 10. I also threw Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 in here just so I would have them somewhere if I needed them at some point and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and close this I'm going to shut this system down and then we're going to boot off of this thumb drive so I can show you what it looks like when it boots up and to shut down just go ahead and click the start button click on your shutdown button and that's it the system should shut down at that point now to boot up off of a thumb drive you need to find out what key you need to push on your system in order to boot from a thumb drive and that's that's going to be up to you on my system here I just go into the BIOS and boot from a thumb drive however on your system there's a lot of different options there on a Dell you hit F12 to boot from a thumb drive and on an HP you hit the Escape key and then choose I think it's F9 in order to get to your your different boot devices however on your own system you're going to have to figure out what that is for you so let's get into it I'm going to go ahead and boot this system back up and I'll see you there okay so on my system you just go into the BIOS and you click right here where it says boot menu however that might be different on yours so go ahead and refer to your manufacturer's documentation to find out exactly what key you push in order to get to the boot menu but I'm going to go ahead and push this now and it gives me these different options right here now I could boot from the Windows boot manager but that's not really going to help us much now is it we want to go ahead and boot from the USB thumb drive and for that I'm going to go ahead and click on the uafi general USB flash drive however you can also boot from regular MBR as well and depending on what ISO you're booting from this is going to be really important because if you boot from UEFI but the iso is made for MBR it won't work so go ahead and boot for whichever ISO you're actually trying to boot from off of this drive so I'm going to go ahead and click this one right now and once we click that there we go we're into the menu system and from here you can go ahead and select any of the different isos that you have on this disk in order to boot from them however one thing that I wish this would do would be to organize the menu system in a way to where it would have subdirectories and things of that nature because I organized this USB drive specifically for that reason however you can do that if you click on F3 for Tree View as you can see down here on the bottom of the screen so if I hit F3 it'll go into a tree view where it looks more like it would if it you're looking at it through file explorer so from there we go into our ISO directory and you can see the different isos and directories that I have inside of here so there is a way to do it it's just not a perfect way so for this one I'm going to go ahead and click on let's click on Windows 10 and then again click on boot in normal mode and there you go it should boot from the Windows 10 disk now some of the issues I ran into with this thing aren't really issues with the program itself but more annoyances from me thinking the program should work differently than it actually does for instance like I showed you I organized all my isos into folders and I think the program should make subdirectories in the menu system this very well may be possible but out of the box it doesn't do that however like I showed you it does allow you to do something similar by opening the tree view but you have to select that in the menu every time you boot the drive and as you can see from the way that I configured my drive I put everything into ISO folders and then had subdirectories for different isos that I wanted organized in different ways I did this simply to organize the drive better this would also come in really handy if you plan on using the thumb drive for other things as well however I won't be using this as my regular daily thumb drive primarily because I don't need 60 gigs of isos with me at all times but but this will be replacing all of these thumb drives in my shop that's for sure I think one of the biggest benefits to this program goes beyond just the ability to boot multiple isos personally my favorite feature of this program has to do with you no longer have to create a bootable USB drive when you need one I can just grab the iso throw it onto a thumb drive and choose which ISO I want to boot from when I boot I can see this being a major Time Saver now the only problem I have is is that I have another one of these exact same thumb drives right here with another program on it this program is used to automatically install drivers on Windows systems so now it looks like I'm gonna have to find a way to distinguish this drive from that drive for the future maybe I should actually invest in a label maker I don't know we'll see with all that said if you'd like to have an easier way to install drivers and windows just like I did with this thumb drive I did a video on that a while back too and you can check that out here I can tell you right now that that program has saved me a massive amount of time as always you guys have a great day

Channel: CyberCPU Tech

Views: 323,801

Keywords: ventoy multiboot usb, bootable usb flash drive, how to create a multiboot usb flash drive, make multiboot usb flash drive, bootable usb, Multiple ISOs on one usb drive

Id: 3isvLpUic-c

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022