Looking for recommendations for a versatile USB stick with Ventoy. I’m trying to create the “perfect, all-in-all” USB stick using Ventoy to store various ISOs and rescue tools. So far, I have the following ISOs:
- Arch
- OpenSuse TW
- NixOS
- Bazzite + AuroraDX
- Win10 ISO
- Clonezilla
I’m looking for suggestions on additional ISOs or tools that are compatible with Ventoy. What do you recommend adding to make my USB stick to make it more useful?
Looking at my Ventoy stick i have multiple folders for different OS:
Arch_Based:
- CachyOS
- Garuda
Debian_Based:
- Debian Bookworm
- Mint
- Zorin OS
Fedora_Based:
- Fedora Silverblue
- Nobara
GamingBox
- Bazzite
- ChimeraOS
ServerOS:
- Ubuntu Server
- TrueNAS Scale
Windows:
- Tiny10
- Tiny11
Tools:
- Avira Rescue System
- SuperGrub2
- UBCD
It’s a 64GB stick and i manually keep it in sync with my netbootxyz instance
Ohhh I’ve meant to try out netbootxyz for a while now, thanks for the reminder!
I’m an arch user, and also have a small proxmox based homelab. I always have a live Ubuntu around, the latest desktop version available. Good for troubleshooting. Also, latest proxmox, opnsense, pfsense, debian.
Additionally, I have a small USB drive on my keychain with both USB C and USB A, where I keep some encrypted backups of important stuff, and I can access that from both my laptop and my phone.
Ventoy with Arch and Rescue bootable images. And a portable cross platform encryption tool just in case.
Hirens boot cd is a great tool if you’re working with windows. You are not always going to need it, but when you do need it it’s awfully nice to have it.
Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!
If I need to do an emergency boot from a USB stick to repair something that can’t boot, which it sounds like is what you’re after, pretty much any Linux distro will do. I’d probably rather have a single, mainstream bootable OS than a handful.
I’d use Debian, just because that’s what I use normally, so I’m most familiar with it. But it really doesn’t matter all that much.
And honestly, while having an emergency bootable medium with a functioning system can simplify things, if you’re familiar with the boot process, you very rarely actually need emergency boot media on a Linux system. You have a pretty flexible bootloader in grub, and the Linux kernel can run and be usable enough to fix things on a pretty broken system, if you pass something like init=/bin/sh to the kernel, maybe busybox instead for a really broken system, and can remount root read-write (mount -o rw,remount /) and know how to force syncs (echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger) and reboots (echo b > //sysrq-trigger).
I’ve killed ld.so and libc before and broght back systems without alternate boot media. The only time I think you’d likely really get into trouble truly requiring alternate boot media is (a) installing a new kernel that doesn’t work for some reason and removing all the old, working kernels before checking to see that your new one works, or (b) killing grub. Maybe if you hork up your partition table or root filesystem enough that grub can’t bring the kernel up, but in most of those cases, I’m not sure that you’re likely gonna be bringing things back up with rescue tools – you’re probably gonna need to reinstall your OS anyway.
EDIT: Well, okay, if you wipe the partition table, I guess that you might be able to find the beginning of a filesystem partition based on magic strings or something and either manually reconstruct the partition table or at least extract a copy of the filesystem to somewhere else.
“Rarely happens”
And yet it still happens often enough if you touch enough boxes or make enough changes across enough boxes.
The thing is, you never know when or where an unbootable box is going to occur. This is why I’ve carried a loaded thumbdrive for ~20 years (Lacie IAmAKey was my latest, wish they still made them - mine finally died. Knockoffs are available, unfortunately the casing is aluminum, not stainless, so they’re easy to bend). And why I keep hot spares around.
