Boot any ISO From a USB Flash Drive

It used to be impossible to boot any ISO from a USB drive. You had to format the USB drive every time with your new ISO, and the process was long and painful.

Recently, developers released an open-source tool called Ventoy that can boot any ISO from a USB drive, and it’s awesome! You simply install Ventoy on your USB drive, copy all your ISOs over, and choose from a list of ISOs to boot.

It works with Windows and Linux ISOs, and boots them on both UEFI and Legacy BIOS systems.

Boot any ISO from a USB Drive Steps

To get Ventoy installed and boot any ISO from USB, you can follow these steps.

1. Install Ventoy to USB Drive

1.1 The USB Drive

First, get a USB drive to hold your Ventoy install and your ISO images. I recommend no less than a 16 GB drive. Of course, the more storage you have, the more ISOs and other files you’ll be able to store on the drive.

You should also use a dedicated USB drive, since Ventoy will erase anything that’s already stored on it (although you can still use it for regular file storage again after Ventoy is installed).

1.2 Download Ventoy

Next, download the Ventoy installer. An installer exists for both Windows and Linux. Alternatively, you can download the live CD and use the Ventoy live environment to run the installer.

1.3 Install Ventoy

Insert the USB drive and run the Ventoy installer.

Select the USB drive from the dropdown menu and click Install.

After a minute or so, you should get a message that the installation is complete!

You should now have a bootable Ventoy USB. You can try to boot it, and you should see the Ventoy menu, but there are no ISOs to boot. Let’s fix that.

2. Copying ISOs to Ventoy USB Drive

You can copy your ISOs to the USB drive’s root, or you can put them in a folder. To demonstrate, I like to create a folder called ISOs at the root of the drive and put them in there.

3. Boot any ISO from Ventoy USB

Insert your Ventoy USB in the computer and go to your computer’s boot menu (normally F10, F11 or ESC to access it upon boot).

Select your USB drive from the menu to boot Ventoy.

You should see the Ventoy menu and the list of bootable ISOs.

Finally, to boot any ISO, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight the ISO you want to boot and press Enter.

Whether booting a Linux or Windows ISO, you should see the system boot to the ISO with no problems!

Remarks

• To boot the Ventoy USB on some UEFI systems, you may need to temporarily disable secure boot in your BIOS settings.
• When you select an ISO to boot from Ventoy, you may get a secondary menu asking which mode to boot in. For example, for Windows ISOs, you will be asked if you want to boot in normal mode or wimboot mode. You should normally select normal mode, unless you are having trouble booting the ISO in normal mode, in which case you can try one of the other modes.