Introduction to Ventoy

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 multibootable USB stick, where it allows you to boot from any ISOs or bootable images you put into it.

Ventoy is a Great Option

It's really easy. You literally drag and drop the ISOs into it and then it allows you to boot 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.

Setting Up Ventoy

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 instructions carefully. First, we need to format the drive and 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.

Formatting the Drive

Once we install Ventoy, literally all you have to do is run the program again with the new one and click update. 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 we 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.

Using Ventoy

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. 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.

The Secure Boot Issue

Like I mentioned, secure boot is probably going to be enabled on your computer. It's not a problem. 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. Might say access denied or an error or something. This is okay. It's really easy to fix.

How to Fix Secure Boot Issues

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.

The Ventoy Experience

Once we've set up Ventoy, literally all you have to do is copy the ISOs onto the bigger data partition. And those will show up as bootable when you boot to the Ventoy disk on your computer. You can also rename the big partition. Doesn't have to be called Ventoy.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enIn today's video, I'm going to be talkingabout a game-changing piece of software thatyou guys actually told me about.In a previous video, I was talking about fourdifferent bootable USB drives that everyoneshould make.They can act as rescue drives in case yourcomputer doesn't boot or something like thatand you have to fix it.In that video, I mentioned that you wouldneed four different USB drives, one for eachof the disks.However, in the comments, a lot of you toldme about a program called Ventoy, which basicallyallows you to really easily create a multibootable USB stick, where it allows you toboot from any ISOs or bootable images youput into it.It's really easy.You literally drag and drop the ISOs intoit and then it allows you to put from them.It's even open source, so that adds anotherlevel of credibility and trust to it.In this video, I'm going to show you how itworks and how to set it up and why I thinkit's so cool.Make sure you follow along, because thereare a couple of steps that might be confusing,specifically around the secure boot featurethat a lot of computers have.You have to specially set up this USB bootdisk 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 Instagramaccount.If you haven't seen it yet, it's just @thiojoeon Instagram.Be careful if you have any kind of medicalcondition, because you may die of laughingso hard over there.I usually post either funny tech names, usuallyas stories or posts, as well as just coolstuff 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 needone USB drive, the bigger, the better, thoughbecause that way you can store more bootableISOs on it.I would recommend probably about 64 gigabytesor more.By the way, USB drives are dirt cheap thesedays.The one I got and I would recommend is probablythe 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 reallygood durability and write speeds and stufflike that.It's actually a good one for 12 bucks.How can you beat that?Or if you want to go hogwild crazy, you canspend a whopping $22 and get a 128 gigabytes.I'll put the link to that for Amazon in thedescription, if you want to check that oneout.Anyway, once you pick out a thumb drive, makesure it's empty and you're not using it foranything else, because it will be wiped.You just download the installer for Ventoy,either from their website, Ventoy.net, orthe 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 runthe Ventoy2Disk.exe set-up file.When you run it, you'll see this.Just make sure you double check the driveletter and the device you're selecting, becauseanything you do select will be completelywiped, so remember that.Here's a really important thing not to forget,though, is go up to options and then clicksecure boot support.Now, when you click the dropdown, it'll showit as checked.Also, next to the version name of Ventoy,lower in the window, it'll show that littlelock to show that it's been enabled.The reason this is important is because mostcomputers have what is called secure boot.It's a feature in the BIOS that basicallyonly allows drives and disks and stuff likethat to run if it's been signed in a certainway.Ventoy, I guess, because it's running multiplethings, it's signed by itself.So you have to manually tell the BIOS to allowthis to be run.Or you would have to just disable secure bootaltogether in the BIOS, which is probablynot recommended, but you just have to do acouple more steps.It's actually easy.I'll show you how to do it later, but justbe aware that if you don't check secure bootsupport and you try to run it, it'll justnot run.For the partition style, just keep it as MBR,Master Boot Record.If your computer doesn't like it for somereason, you can always change it to GPT later.Then you just click install.It's going to format the drive, wipe everythingon it and create a couple different partitions.One is going to be the boot partition thatthe BIOS is going to use to boot off.That's going to be hidden.Then there's going to be the bigger data partitionwhere you're going to copy the ISOs onto it.When it's done, you'll see the Ventoy namefor the USB.Now, that's the big partition you're goingto 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 thaton the right-hand side it'll show what versionof Ventoy is on the USB drive as well as thelittle lock to show that the support for securitywas added.Oh, and if you want to update with a morerecent version of Ventoy, literally all youhave to do is run the program again with thenewer one and click update.Then it'll overwrite the old program, butactually keep everything in the data partition.So it's not like you have to recopy everythingover it.Then once you install it, you literally justhave to copy the image or ISO files, whatever,into that disk and those will show up as bootablewhen you boot to the Ventoy disk on your computer.You just select from whatever ones.It also supports several other types, suchas image files, IMG, WIM, that's Windows imageor 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'rebooting up the computer, you have to get tohowever your computer lets you select thebootable device.Sometimes there's just a key you have to keeppressing.Or at least there's almost always a way todo it from the BIOS.Just look up how to get to the BIOS from yourspecific computer model.Then you can usually boot to whatever deviceyou want.Also, if you see two partitions listed, Ibelieve the second one is the one you haveto select.If it doesn't, you can just try it.But in my case, the second one is the oneand you have to choose.Now, like I mentioned, secure boot is probablygoing to be enabled on your computer.It's not a problem.It just means the first time you boot to Ventoyon that computer, you have to basically adda 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 upthat looks like this.It might say access denied or an error orsomething.This is okay.It's really easy to fix.However, if you try to boot to the USB andnothing happens, or the computer just restarts,that might mean you forgot to enable secureboot support.That's at least what I experienced.So just double check that.In this menu, the Ventoy website has a listof steps to follow.All you have to do is basically press entera couple of times.When you get to the window about enrollingthe key, just select enroll key from disk,then the next one you'll see several optionsand you select the one that either says EFIor VTOYEFI.Then in the next one, you'll choose the optionthat says, \"Enroll this key in Mockmanager.\"Then you hit continue, and then yes, enrollthe key and then reboot.And now, it should work.This is what you'll see in the Ventoy bootscreen.You'll see literally a list of the image orISO files that you copied in before.There are a couple options such as memdiskmode, which loads the whole ISO into memoryor something before booting.If you have some issues, that might be somethingto try.Also, if you want, you could organize theISOs into different folders.In that case, if you select tree mode, that'llbasically let you see the different directorystructure and show the folders, not just allof them listed at once.The option for local boot, just boots to theregular hard drive.Then the tools option is stuff like keyboardlayout, screen display mode, some pluginsyou may have added, stuff like that.To boot to any of these images, you literallyjust highlight it and select it.And that's it.It'll boot to it just like as if you had putit 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 mightthink the menu looks kind of ugly, but itdoes support themes.Ventoy uses the GRUB boot loader, which isalso 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, andthey have a page for GRUB themes.On the right hand side, you can literallysee a list of the most popular ones that probablylook the best.Actually, the top one called BigSur GRUB thememakes it even easier, because they have apre-made Ventoy version, so you just downloadthe Ventoy version from the site.It is a TAR file, so you'll need like 7-Zipor WinRAR to open it.But then you literally just copy the Ventoyfolder into the main directory of the USBdrive, along with all the other ISOs.Now, when you boot up the USB, it'll looka lot prettier.Most of the other themes, unfortunately, don'thave a pre-made Ventoy download.You'll just have to do it yourself, whichis an extra step.So basically just create that Ventoy folderin the top level of the USB drive.It is case sensitive, so no capitals.Then in that folder, you can create anotherthemes folder.And in there, just put the folder with thedownloaded theme in it.The only tricky part, which isn't really thattricky, because you just copy and paste it,is you have to create a Ventoy.json file andthen put in this JSON code and just edit itto tell it where the actual theme.text fileis.So just change the name of the theme basicallyin that file path.I'll put that code in the description, soyou can literally just copy and paste it intothe file.If you want to customize it even more, youcan just download one of the themes, use itbasically as a template.Then open up something like the background.pngfile in Photoshop and edit it to look howeveryou want.Just make sure you keep it at the same resolution.Ventoy does have a lot of other plugins thatare optional, but they seem to be pretty specialized,a bit technical and they do require furtherediting to the JSON file.I'm not really going to get into those.Really just the main feature is kind of themain point.You can see some of the examples of the ISOsI've put in here so far.I have memtest86, which is good for testingthe memory or the RAM or whatever.The Ubuntu live disk is in there.There's also the Windows PE installation thatI 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 theymight not work, but I figured why not?I also threw in the Windows 10 installationmedia, because that could come in handy, alongwith Hiren Boot CD, which I mentioned severaltimes.Basically, it's a bootable disk that has aton of tools in there that can be used foreverything from disk recovery to fixing stuffwhen Windows won't boot.It does look like Windows, because it runson 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, thenext one I would recommend at this point isthat one where I talk about four differentbootable USB drives everyone should make.Now, you can watch that and it's even easierto set them up.You just copy the files onto Ventoy.Let me know what you guys think down in thecomments, 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 tomiss any new videos, which is bound to happenif 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.\n"