Ventoy VS SimpleDiskImager

Ventoy is an open-source tool to create a bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. Using Ventoy, we can create live USB for multiple distros in one flash disk. This is a revolutionary feature compared to other tools, e.g., Etcher, Rufus, etc, that can only create one live USB at a time. This tool is so important. Don't call yourself a distro hopper if you don't know this tool.

I'm thinking you mean Ventoy? They say they can load vhd and img files, though I've only tried ISO's myself.

https://www.ventoy.net/

View on GitHub

I faced it too. There is a PR on the ventoy GitHub repository that fixes Proxmox boot.

https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/actions/runs/7088423200

> While this works, I find this method a bit tedious to use, at least compared to Ventoy [0].

I find ventoy more tedious, because you can't use it on your hard drive with a sane partitioning scheme.

The only reason is because of how the ventoy detection hardcode the partition boundaries in its checks, and it means Ventoy can only run with the partitions set in a way that may lead to alignment issues like write-amplification: I've detailed that in https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/1342

Ideally I'd have a 10G partition after the EFI (or it could even be the EFI itself) with a few ISOs for rescue purposes + a UEFI entry to avoid having to use a bootable USB, but that's not possible with Ventoy unless I accept Ventoy choices of partition boundaries:

                (pMBR->PartTbl[0].StartSectorId != 2048 ||

I downloaded and made a bootable USB Ventoy (https://www.ventoy.net) with its Windows GUI app in my updated 64-bit W10 Pro PC. However, I couldn't seem to get VirtualBox v7.0.12 to boot it. I read VirtualBox can boot from bootable USB flash sticks so it should work. Am I missing something?

So, yes. The installer will need to install grub to that first partition. You can install ventoy to a usb drive, put a windows iso there and your q4os iso. In case you mess up big time, you can reinstall windows.

Rufus is great for writing Windows ISOs to thumb drives. Sometimes it tries to be too smart though. In particular I had trouble writing a SmartOS disk image successfully.

I tried writing something[1] that would be a little smarter than Win32 Disk Imager. That is, it will adjust EFI partition labeling. Otherwise it will just write the image. After some experimentation that is what was needed to get a SmartOS disk image to boot on my old laptop.

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but you can’t use something like dd to write invalid disk partitioning data and expect it to boot. EFI expects there to be a header at the beginning and end of the disk. Furthermore, I can’t try to “optimize” my disk image writer by skipping zeroed sectors and expect everything to work out fine. Without knowledge of the file system format, leaving sectors uncleared causes all kinds of fun data corruption.

[1]: https://github.com/AustinWise/SimpleDiskImager