That’s what I’m saying - booting OSes is the only legitimate use now unless you want to put stuff on an offline machine (eg installed Linux and need to put broadcom proprietary driver packages on it to be able to connect, cuz no access to an ethernet cable)
Why is everyone suggesting ventoy and stuff and no one is telling you to just reformat drives you no longer need? Or are they all live OSs in use? Am I missing something?
I mean, they clearly already know how to do a fresh image of a live OS on a USB key. But the number of keys involved sounds like they don’t know you only need one.
I know my use case isn’t the standard for everyone, but at this moment I have six different Linux distros in use. I keep my most commonly used ISOs on a Ventoy so I can easily install an OS on a machine I’m rehabilitating, or maybe just because I want a change of pace. I could write the ISO I want to the drive every time I want to change something, but it’s a waste of time when I can have 15 or 20 of them ready to go on one drive. It’s just my particular use case, I’m sure others have other reasons they prefer it.
I got a 128GB dual connector usb-c/usb-a drive, and installed ventoy on it. I have my normal files and for my ISOs I simply put them in the ventoy folder. It works really well.
I have an nvme enclosure with a 256 gig drive in it, I think I partitioned a quarter of it for ventoy, rest is for regular storage. It’s really nice to have if I do family support, have any iso I need and any utility I might need on top of that. Is it overkill for my needs? Yeah, but it’s nice to have and I didn’t go for anything fancy, just a cheap crucial drive.
Ventoy, as everyone else says, is your friend here.
Though I saw something similar in a video recently which I’m gonna call out for completeness, the IODD devices that let you change the image on the fly:
I kinda like a little thingy that has a USB plug on one end under a cap, and a salt shaker on the other. Or maybe like a little hot sauce shaker, if we’re moving away from salt.
those were so long ago they're small enough that windows would still be able to format them fat32 even with its built-in limitations on formatting that filesystem.
what would be completely useless is scrolling through a larger flash drive' or card's files, one or two at a time.
What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware? Also, they could be made so that there’s a simple API (like a serial device exposed via USB) and apps for Win/macOS/Linux to update the label. But I guess the demand was never there.
What makes you think there’s no way of updating the firmware?
I don't know, but the amount of USB drives I've seen with a readily identifiable serial or jtag port and API documentation is exactly zero. 😉
I think most of them were one-and-done, as in, code/hardware was designed once, and never iterated on again, at least not for devices already in the field.
Check out Ventoy! Unless you need a single ISO on the drive, it’s just something you install to it and then copy and paste ISOs to the folder on it. No flashing needed, it runs them for you. I’ve got 128GB drives almost filled with every ISO I could possibly want.
I need this, my local dollar store sells 32GB USB2 key for $5, I have one for MX, MX-AHS, MX32bits, antix, etc I have multiple 32GB keys with just 1 or 2 GB used, I will check this ventoy!
It would definitely be worth checking out, I wiped all of my individual sticks after I started using it. Also, I don’t know if the speed would make much difference in your use case, but SanDisk 32GB USB3.0 drives are usually less than $8.
Also worth noting, you should create file named .ventoyignore in the directories with other files. Otherwise Ventoy searches everything which slows it down.
I’ve definitely done that before! I’ll use a Ventoy as a portable OS to test things I don’t want to break my main system, then shut it down to reset to normal. It’s nice to not need a second stick to bring in or save other files while doing that.
Note that some devices aren’t able to correctly mount the second partition.
I guess this is because the first partition is used to boot ventoy, while the second partition holds data and some devices (e.g. printers) won’t mount the second partition.
PS: I nearly wasn’t able to hold a presentation because of this, luckily a second stick/phone/copy on web storage saved me, iirc.
This only ever really applies to devices without UIs or otherwise embedded OSs, and personally I wouldn’t trust a drive with more than a handful of files in such a device anyway.
It does support arm!! Most arm devices do not support UEFI though, and have very proprietary boot processes requiring custom kernels and such, so your milage may vary. UEFI arm (like on Libre Computer boards) will work flawlessly.
For rpi images i think the best option would be PINN; but it’s not a 1:1 equivalent since every time you add an image it needs to wipe partitions and start from zero.
Sounds like the regular way still works for you then! I’ve given away most of my smaller drives, I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything smaller than 32GB right now.
Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.
Put your SSD into this case and enjoy proper CD/DVD/BluRay emulation, multiple VHDs and much more.
EDIT: Not an ad, @Okus . Just the only case that has all these features. And it’s no affiliate link, so I don’t even get anything if somebody clicks on it.
It still works for installing the OS though, at least in the case of Nix. I’ve not tried Guix so far, but I’ve installed NixOS on two machines in the past year using Ventoy.
I have experience with both the distros, and I’ve used them extensively for my personal projects in both of the machines I have. It’s a hit-and-miss, according to the NixOS forums. Using Ventoy causes Stage-1 boot to fail, and in both the machines and distros I’ve tried, it hasn’t worked.
Interesting. I wonder if it’s an incompatible UEFI/BIOS? Both of the machines I put it on were fairly new, one was first boot on a server I built, the other was a recent laptop that I decided to run it on for a while.
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