You got a new OS image you want to try? Simply copy it in the remaining space of your multi-boot USB drive, and instantly you get yourself one more boot option.
A single USB drive can hold more than one ISO files, and you can conveniently choose one of them from a boot menu. With Ventoy, you no longer need to format a USB drive again and again to boot from multiple ISO images. Essentially Ventoy is a multi-ISO bootloader. Ventoy is an open-source tool conceived to exactly fill this need: create a single USB drive for multiple ISO files. Also, the GRUB-based approach does not provide the portability of a USB drive. Although it's possible to boot ISO files using GRUB, it's rather cumbersome to modify GRUB configuration each time you want to add a new ISO file to try. It is not only inconvenient as I need to re-format the USB drive with a new ISO file every time I need to boot from a different ISO file, but also quite wasteful as a typical USB drive has much bigger space than a single ISO image. However, a typical bootable USB drive or memory stick can only boot from a single ISO file stored on the drive. However, for people like me who would like to try out all sorts of Linux distros and different releases of each distro for testing purposes, as part of writing tutorials, what would be nice is the ability to boot multiple ISO images from a single USB drive. You can easily create a bootable USB by burning an ISO image on a USB drive with tools like Gparted or UNetbootin. Such capability is quite useful in various scenarios, for example, when you need to diagnose and repair a corrupted file system of a host computer, or when you want to test drive an alternative OS or the latest release of your favorite Linux distro before installing it. How to boot multiple ISO images from one USB drive on LinuxĪ bootable USB drive allows you to instantly run a full-fledged OS from the file system on the USB drive, rather than from the host computer's hard drive.