The release of Ventoy 1.1.18 has been published, designed for creating bootable USB drives that include multiple operating systems. The program allows you to boot OS from unmodified ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, and EFI images, without the need to extract the image or reformat the drive. Simply copy the desired set of images to a USB flash drive with the Ventoy loader, and it will ensure the booting of the operating systems contained within the images. At any time, you can replace or add new ISO images just by copying the new files, which is convenient for testing and getting familiar with various distributions and operating systems. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the GPLv3 license.
Ventoy supports booting on systems with BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI, UEFI Secure Boot, and MIPS64EL UEFI with MBR or GPT partition tables. It supports various versions of Windows, WinPE, Linux, BSD, ChromeOS, and images from Vmware and Xen. The developers have tested Ventoy with over 1200 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions, and more than a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.). of virtual machines Vmware and Xen. The developers have tested the functionality in Ventoy with 1460 ISO images, including various versions of Windows and Windows Server, several hundred Linux distributions, and over a dozen BSD systems (FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, pfSense, FreeNAS, etc.).
In addition to USB drives, the Ventoy bootloader can be installed on local disks, SSDs, NVMe, SD cards, and other types of storage that use FAT32, exFAT, NTFS, UDF, XFS, or Ext2/3/4 file systems. There is a mode for automated installation of the operating system into a single file on a portable medium, with the option to add your own files to the created environment (for example, to create images with Windows or Linux distributions that do not support Live mode).
In the new version:
- Experimental support for booting recovery images of SteamOS has been added.
- Support for ISO images with Syslinux bootloader has been added.
- The ability to remount partitions has been added, allowing direct access from the sidebar in the graphical interface of running Linux distributions to the partitions on the storage device (e.g., on USB Flash) containing the ISO image loaded via Ventoy (previously, attempts to mount the partition containing the ISO image resulted in a 'device busy' error). The partition associated with the ISO image is now created in the Device Mapper as /dev/mapper/VentoyPart.
- Issues with booting Fedora 45-beta, LinuxConsole, and Grml 2026.09 distributions have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
