In today's video, I'm going to be talking
about a game-changing piece of software that you guys actually told me about. In a previous video, I was talking about four
different bootable USB drives that everyone should make. They can act as rescue drives in case your
computer doesn't boot or something like that and you have to fix it. In that video, I mentioned that you would
need four different USB drives, one for each of the disks. However, in the comments, a lot of you told
me about a program called Ventoy, which basically allows you to really easily create a multi
bootable USB stick, where it allows you to boot from any ISOs or bootable images you
put into it. It's really easy. You literally drag and drop the ISOs into
it and then it allows you to put from them. It's even open source, so that adds another
level of credibility and trust to it. In this video, I'm going to show you how it
works and how to set it up and why I think it's so cool. Make sure you follow along, because there
are a couple of steps that might be confusing, specifically around the secure boot feature
that a lot of computers have. You have to specially set up this USB boot
disk if you want that to work with your computer. So make sure you follow the steps. But it's really not that hard. You just have to follow along. Before I walk you through how to set it up,
I do want to give a shout out to my Instagram account. If you haven't seen it yet, it's just @thiojoe
on Instagram. Be careful if you have any kind of medical
condition, because you may die of laughing so hard over there. I usually post either funny tech names, usually
as stories or posts, as well as just cool stuff in general. So check that out just @thiojoe over an Instagram. Hope to see over there. So with that being said, we can move on. All right. To get started, you're just going to need
one USB drive, the bigger, the better, though because that way you can store more bootable
ISOs on it. I would recommend probably about 64 gigabytes
or more. By the way, USB drives are dirt cheap these
days. The one I got and I would recommend is probably
the Samsung BAR Plus thumb drive. You can get it on Amazon these days for literally
$12 for a 64 gigabyte one. It's a good one, too, like 3.1 USB. It's really good speeds. Some testing I've seen shows it has really
good durability and write speeds and stuff like that. It's actually a good one for 12 bucks. How can you beat that? Or if you want to go hogwild crazy, you can
spend a whopping $22 and get a 128 gigabytes. I'll put the link to that for Amazon in the
description, if you want to check that one out. Anyway, once you pick out a thumb drive, make
sure it's empty and you're not using it for anything else, because it will be wiped. You just download the installer for Ventoy,
either from their website, Ventoy.net, or the get hub releases page for the project. I'll put the links to that in the description,
as well. Then once it's downloaded, you simply run
the Ventoy2Disk.exe set-up file. When you run it, you'll see this. Just make sure you double check the drive
letter and the device you're selecting, because anything you do select will be completely
wiped, so remember that. Here's a really important thing not to forget,
though, is go up to options and then click secure boot support. Now, when you click the dropdown, it'll show
it as checked. Also, next to the version name of Ventoy,
lower in the window, it'll show that little lock to show that it's been enabled. The reason this is important is because most
computers have what is called secure boot. It's a feature in the BIOS that basically
only allows drives and disks and stuff like that to run if it's been signed in a certain
way. Ventoy, I guess, because it's running multiple
things, it's signed by itself. So you have to manually tell the BIOS to allow
this to be run. Or you would have to just disable secure boot
altogether in the BIOS, which is probably not recommended, but you just have to do a
couple more steps. It's actually easy. I'll show you how to do it later, but just
be aware that if you don't check secure boot support and you try to run it, it'll just
not run. For the partition style, just keep it as MBR,
Master Boot Record. If your computer doesn't like it for some
reason, you can always change it to GPT later. Then you just click install. It's going to format the drive, wipe everything
on it and create a couple different partitions. One is going to be the boot partition that
the BIOS is going to use to boot off. That's going to be hidden. Then there's going to be the bigger data partition
where you're going to copy the ISOs onto it. When it's done, you'll see the Ventoy name
for the USB. Now, that's the big partition you're going
to use. By the way, you can also rename that. It doesn't have to be called Ventoy. Also, once it's done, you'll now see that
on the right-hand side it'll show what version of Ventoy is on the USB drive as well as the
little lock to show that the support for security was added. Oh, and if you want to update with a more
recent version of Ventoy, literally all you have to do is run the program again with the
newer one and click update. Then it'll overwrite the old program, but
actually keep everything in the data partition. So it's not like you have to recopy everything
over it. Then once you install it, you literally just
have to copy the image or ISO files, whatever, into that disk and those will show up as bootable
when you boot to the Ventoy disk on your computer. You just select from whatever ones. It also supports several other types, such
as image files, IMG, WIM, that's Windows image or something like that. And even virtual hard drive files, VHD. It supports a lot. It's really easy. Just copy it over. And to boot it, literally, just when you're
booting up the computer, you have to get to however your computer lets you select the
bootable device. Sometimes there's just a key you have to keep
pressing. Or at least there's almost always a way to
do it from the BIOS. Just look up how to get to the BIOS from your
specific computer model. Then you can usually boot to whatever device
you want. Also, if you see two partitions listed, I
believe the second one is the one you have to select. If it doesn't, you can just try it. But in my case, the second one is the one
and you have to choose. Now, like I mentioned, secure boot is probably
going to be enabled on your computer. It's not a problem. It just means the first time you boot to Ventoy
on that computer, you have to basically add a key to it so the computer will allow it. The first time you do boot to the Ventoy USB,
you'll probably see a blue window come up that looks like this. It might say access denied or an error or
something. This is okay. It's really easy to fix. However, if you try to boot to the USB and
nothing happens, or the computer just restarts, that might mean you forgot to enable secure
boot support. That's at least what I experienced. So just double check that. In this menu, the Ventoy website has a list
of steps to follow. All you have to do is basically press enter
a couple of times. When you get to the window about enrolling
the key, just select enroll key from disk, then the next one you'll see several options
and you select the one that either says EFI or VTOYEFI. Then in the next one, you'll choose the option
that says, "Enroll this key in Mockmanager." Then you hit continue, and then yes, enroll
the key and then reboot. And now, it should work. This is what you'll see in the Ventoy boot
screen. You'll see literally a list of the image or
ISO files that you copied in before. There are a couple options such as memdisk
mode, which loads the whole ISO into memory or something before booting. If you have some issues, that might be something
to try. Also, if you want, you could organize the
ISOs into different folders. In that case, if you select tree mode, that'll
basically let you see the different directory structure and show the folders, not just all
of them listed at once. The option for local boot, just boots to the
regular hard drive. Then the tools option is stuff like keyboard
layout, screen display mode, some plugins you may have added, stuff like that. To boot to any of these images, you literally
just highlight it and select it. And that's it. It'll boot to it just like as if you had put
it on its own USB drive. So it's dead simple. There's not much to it, but just super useful. And cool. Now, one thing I'll point out is you might
think the menu looks kind of ugly, but it does support themes. Ventoy uses the GRUB boot loader, which is
also used by a lot of Linux distributions. There are many themes out there for that,
so it does support those. There is one website, gnome-look.org, and
they have a page for GRUB themes. On the right hand side, you can literally
see a list of the most popular ones that probably look the best. Actually, the top one called BigSur GRUB theme
makes it even easier, because they have a pre-made Ventoy version, so you just download
the Ventoy version from the site. It is a TAR file, so you'll need like 7-Zip
or WinRAR to open it. But then you literally just copy the Ventoy
folder into the main directory of the USB drive, along with all the other ISOs. Now, when you boot up the USB, it'll look
a lot prettier. Most of the other themes, unfortunately, don't
have a pre-made Ventoy download. You'll just have to do it yourself, which
is an extra step. So basically just create that Ventoy folder
in the top level of the USB drive. It is case sensitive, so no capitals. Then in that folder, you can create another
themes folder. And in there, just put the folder with the
downloaded theme in it. The only tricky part, which isn't really that
tricky, because you just copy and paste it, is you have to create a Ventoy.json file and
then put in this JSON code and just edit it to tell it where the actual theme.text file
is. So just change the name of the theme basically
in that file path. I'll put that code in the description, so
you can literally just copy and paste it into the file. If you want to customize it even more, you
can just download one of the themes, use it basically as a template. Then open up something like the background.png
file in Photoshop and edit it to look however you want. Just make sure you keep it at the same resolution. Ventoy does have a lot of other plugins that
are optional, but they seem to be pretty specialized, a bit technical and they do require further
editing to the JSON file. I'm not really going to get into those. Really just the main feature is kind of the
main point. You can see some of the examples of the ISOs
I've put in here so far. I have memtest86, which is good for testing
the memory or the RAM or whatever. The Ubuntu live disk is in there. There's also the Windows PE installation that
I showed you how to make in another video, along with a couple antivirus bootable disks. I don't know, they're kind of old, so they
might not work, but I figured why not? I also threw in the Windows 10 installation
media, because that could come in handy, along with Hiren Boot CD, which I mentioned several
times. Basically, it's a bootable disk that has a
ton of tools in there that can be used for everything from disk recovery to fixing stuff
when Windows won't boot. It does look like Windows, because it runs
on a lightweight version, Windows PE. So really cool one. Useful to have. So not much more to it. It's just a really useful program. Simple to set up. If you guys do want to keep watching, the
next one I would recommend at this point is that one where I talk about four different
bootable USB drives everyone should make. Now, you can watch that and it's even easier
to set them up. You just copy the files onto Ventoy. Let me know what you guys think down in the
comments, if you've found this extremely useful. Also, give it a like and be sure to subscribe. Also, click the bell if you don't want to
miss any new videos, which is bound to happen if you subscribe to a lot of people like me. So anyway, thanks so much for watching, guys. I'll see you in the next video.
The ultimate USB boot drive is Ventoy.
Huh, I'd always used YUMI for this.. but this tool actually seems pretty damn robust too.
Nice post: never heard of this but will be using now.
I refuse to watch anything where people make these dopey faces.
Didn't need a long ass video. Could've just made a post...
Bonus Tip: You can test if the bootable USB drive is actually working by using MobaliveCD
Note: It need admin privileges and may not work well for large ISO files. (referring to MobaLiveCD)
There’s no alternative to this that would allow you to boot compatible ISOs on a Mac (like Memtest86) in addition to Windows computers, right?
Remindme! 12 hours
Honest question: What would be the use case for this?