It's worth noting that you can continue to use the USB stick for other purposes. You can even create a multiboot USB drive by adding ISO files for some Linux distributions and Windows ISO files on the same USB, as seen in the screenshot at the top of this page. When copying multiple ISO files to the USB drive, Ventoy provides a menu on boot from where you can choose which ISO to boot.

] With Ventoy 1.0.52, the application comes with a GUI for Linux (it already had one for Windows). It has a graphical user interface on Windows only on Linux you'll need to use it from the command line. The application is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. You install this tool to a USB drive, then simply copy some ISO files to the USB drive and you can boot from it with no other changes (so without having to reformat the USB drive every time you want to create a bootable USB drive, and without having to extract the ISO file contents). I also used my trusty label maker to mark it as the “BOOT” drive.Ventoy is a fairly new open source tool to create bootable USB drives using Linux or Microsoft Windows ISO files. It’s more convenient to have both ports, and if I’m working on a PC at someone else’s home, I don’t have to remember to bring adapters. The important feature for me is that it has both USB Type-A and USB Type-C connectors - I use a mix of new and old computers, some of which only have the older Type-A, and some that only have the newer Type-C. I didn’t have a spare flash drive already, so I ended up purchasing a 256 GB SanDisk Dual Drive Go, which happens to be one of our picks for the best USB flash drive.

Storage capacity is also important, as we’re now long past the era of install media fitting on a 700MB CD-R - the Windows 11 installer is over 5 GB. If you have an old or cheap flash drive with poor read and write speeds, then it can take longer to boot up and perform installations. Two factors matter the most for turning a USB drive into a boot drive: performance and storage capacity.

Ventoy download for pc