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Thanks for posting this article.

I’ve been using Windows To Go to make bootable installation disks for a couple of years. I liked how Rufus made it possible to boot from a USB instead of CD’s or DVD’s and migrated to using that.

Recently someone suggested trying Ventoy (https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html). It works differently than the Rufus/Windows To Go solution in that you can mount multiple ISO’s on a single boot drive. A simple menu allows you to select the installation (or utility) you wish to install and also keep tools, drivers, and post image applications on the same drive. If you are imaging machines in a non-SCCM or FOG network environment it makes things a bit more efficient.

Adding an additional image is a simple drag and drop to the library - the menu automatically shows it on next boot. It works with all flavors of OS’s - Windows, Linux/Unix, VMWare, etc.

You might find it useful.

Recently someone suggested trying Ventoy (https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html). It works differently than the Rufus/Windows To Go solution in that you can mount multiple ISO's on a single boot drive.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Yes, Ventoy is an extremely helpful tool. It can also be used with tools like various versions of Hiren's BootCD which is actually how I first found it. It is on later versions of Hiren's BootCD. In addition to being able to boot multiple operating systems from various ISOs, it often helps get into systems which have their BIOS and/or UEFI locked down by the manufacturer to keep one from installing a non-windows operating system on the device.

I have an old Windows 8/10 tablet/convertible computer and it is difficult to get it to boot from any USB device. It came with a 32GB SSD which was OK when it was new, but Windows 10 kept growing and eventually it would no longer take any updates... I eventually had to “wipe” the drive which is soldered onto the motherboard. I wanted to put Ubuntu Studio onto it, but I never could get it to work quite right.

For reasons I do not completely understand Ventoy turned out to be very helpful while farting around with this device. Eventually I got a bare bones Windows 10 install on it and also installed compression using the command line with administrator privileges, “Compact.exe /CompactOS:always”. After that I used only portable versions of software on a fast 64GB microSD card that installs in the back of the device.

There are quite a few other options to Rufus and Ventoy when creating bootable USB drives. Some are free and some are paid. Some of the paid versions do some pretty neat tricks that can save a lot of time.