Setting up a Ventoy USB drive on Ubuntu

I recently wanted to try setting up Ventoy on a USB drive that was attached to a remote server due to a slow IPMI/KVM. Ventoy is a tool I use for Windows installations, as well as tools such as Macrium Reflect and PartedMagic, that allows you to create a bootable USB drive that allows you to simply copy ISO files to its partition and then use a boot menu to select which ISO to boot from.

Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.

With ventoy, you don’t need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.

You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.

It’s very simple, so let’s get started!

First, we need to download Ventoy from its website, then extract it:

tar -xf ventoy-X.X.XX-linux.tar.gz
cd ventoy-X.X.XX

I then used the VentoyWeb.sh script to start a basic HTTP server to allow you to very quickly set up the USB drive:

root@server ~/ventoy-X.X.XX # sudo sh VentoyWeb.sh -H X.X.X.X -P XXXX

===============================================================
Ventoy Server 1.0.79 is running ...
Please open your browser and visit http://X.X.X.X:XXXX
===============================================================

################## Press Ctrl + C to exit #####################

It will bind to 127.0.0.1:8080 by default, so you can change the IP and port by changing the values above if you need to access it remotely.

From the web page, select the USB drive and click Install. If Ventoy is already installed on the drive, you can also Update the installation.

We can now mount the USB drive to move files to it. Find out the device name by using the lsblk command:

root@server ~ # lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 1 14.4G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 1 14.4G 0 part /media/root/Ventoy
└─sda2 8:2 1 32M 0 part /media/root/VTOYEFI

The ISO files must be placed on /media/root/Ventoy, so we mount it:

root@server ~ # udisksctl mount -b /dev/sda1
Mounted /dev/sda1 at /media/root/Ventoy

You can now copy or download ISO files directly to the drive:

root@server ~ # cd /media/root/Ventoy
root@server /media/root/Ventoy # ls -l
total 8306784
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4216586240 Sep 16 12:55 Windows Server 2019.iso
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4288466944 Sep 16 12:54 Windows Server 2022.iso

When you’re finished, you can unmount it:

root@server ~ # sudo udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sda1 -f
Unmounted /dev/sda1.