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> 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 ||
See also UEFI drivers that can read a bunch of other file systems (btrfs, ext2/3/4, HFS, ISO, NTFS, UFS/FFS, XFS, ZFS, etc):
* https://efi.akeo.ie
* https://github.com/pbatard/efifs
The UEFI spec specifies (§13.3) that firmware is only required to read FAT32/16/12, which is generally why your /boot/efi is VFAT/FAT32.
If you don't accept this, and want to boot of multiple ISO files by a grub2 bootloader, whether from a thumbdrive or a hard drive, also check the old https://github.com/a1ive/grub2-filemanager (now archived)
Windows uses some weird install process where it needs two partitions for the install media. Basically the whole installation is too big for FAT32 so IIRC the way to have it work is to split the ISO in two having the bootable part on one partition and a lot of the installation content on another.
https://github.com/WoeUSB/WoeUSB