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This article will explain in detail how to put multiple Linux distributions on a U disk. The content of the article is of high quality, so the editor will share it for you as a reference. I hope you will have some understanding of the relevant knowledge after reading this article.

Create a multi-boot USB disk with Ventoy, and you will never be short of your favorite Linux distribution.

Giving friends and neighbors a bootable USB drive containing your favorite Linux distribution is a great way to introduce our favorite Linux experience to Linux beginners. There are still many people who have never heard of Linux, and putting your favorite distribution on a bootable USB drive is a good way to get them into the Linux world.

A few years ago, I was teaching an introductory computer course to a group of middle school students. We used old laptops, and I introduced the students to Fedora, Ubuntu and Poppy laptop OS. After class, I give each student a copy of their favorite distribution and ask them to take it home and install it on the computer of their choice. They are eager to try their new skills at home.

Put multiple distributions on one drive

Recently, a friend introduced me to Ventoy, which (according to its GitHub repository) is "an open source tool that creates bootable USB drives for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD (x) / EFI files." Instead of creating a separate drive for each Linux distribution I want to share, I can put all my favorite Linux distributions on a USB drive!

USB space

As you can imagine, the size of the U disk determines how many distributions you can hold on it. On a 16GB USB drive, I placed Elementary 5.1, Linux Mint Cinnamon 5.1 and Linux Mint XFCE 5.1. But there is still room for 9.9GB.

Get Ventoy

Ventoy is open source, licensed under the GPLv3 license, and can be used for Windows and Linux. There is good documentation on how to download and install Ventoy on Windows. Linux is installed from the command line, so if you are not familiar with the process, it may be a bit confusing. However, it is actually very easy.

First, download Ventoy. I download the archived files to my desktop.

Next, use the tar command to extract the ventoy-x.y.z-linux.tar.gz file (but replace x.y.z with the version number you downloaded) (to keep it simple, I use the * character as any wildcard character in the command):

$tar-xvf ventoy*z

This command extracts all the necessary files to a folder called ventoy-x.y.z on my desktop.

You can also use the archive manager of your Linux distribution to accomplish the same task. After the download and extraction is complete, you can install Ventoy on your USB drive.

Install Ventoy and Linux on a USB disk

Insert your flash drive into your computer. Change the directory to the folder of Ventoy and look for a shell script named Ventoy2Disk.sh. You need to determine the correct mount point for your USB drive so that the script will work properly. You can find it by issuing the mount command on the command line or using the GNOME disk, which provides a graphical interface. The latter shows that my flash drive is mounted on / dev/sda. On your computer, this location may be / dev/sdb or / dev/sdc or something like that.

USB mount point in GNOME disk

The next step is to execute the Ventoy shell script. Because it was designed to indiscriminately copy data to a drive, I used a fake location (/ dev/sdX) to prevent you from copying / pasting errors, so replace the X with the letter of the actual drive you want to overwrite.

Let me repeat: the purpose of this shell script is to copy data to a drive and destroy all data on that drive. If there is data you care about on the drive, back it up before you try this method! If you are not sure where your drive is located, please verify it until you are absolutely sure before you proceed.

Once you have determined the location of your drive, run this script:

$sudo sh Ventoy2Disk.sh-I / dev/sdX

This allows you to format it and install Ventoy on your USB drive. Now you can copy and paste all the Linux distribution files that fit on the USB drive. If you boot from a newly created flash drive on your computer, you will see a menu with the distribution you copied to the flash drive.

Linux distribution in Ventoy

Build a portable power source

Ventoy is the key to carrying multiple boot flash drives on your keychain so that you will never be short of the distribution you rely on. You can have a full-featured desktop, a lightweight distribution, a console-only maintenance tool, and whatever else you want.

On how to put multiple Linux distributions on a U disk to share here, I hope the above content can be of some help to you, can learn more knowledge. If you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see.

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