Ventoy: boot into a Linux vhd
With Ventoy you can create bootable USB devices to boot your machine directly from images like ISO, VHD(X), IMG etc.
I’ve always been a great fan of native boot, but what about Linux? If you want to try a linux distro running natively on your hardware (not in a hypervisor like VMWare / Virtualbox etc.), then you can do that with Ventoy. It’s a versatile tool and it’s a very convenient way to try things / manage your (to be) installed operating systems.
1. What you’ll need
- Hyper-V (or other hypervisor to create the image – but I personally like to have it inside a VHD(X) file
- an ISO of the distro you want to try – I downloaded for this purpose the Linux Mint 21.2 Xfce edition (Linux Mint is Ubuntu based)
2. Steps to follow
- Start your Hyper-V and
- in the left pane select your machine,
- right click on it and select New -> Hard Disk…
- In the next window
- click on Next,
- select VHD (sadly VHDX is not supported by Ventoy),
- then Fixed size (sadly Dynamically expanding is not supported by Ventoy),
- give it a name (e.g. LM212.vhd),
- specify a location for the .vhd file,
- Create a new blank virtual hard disk (with a size of your desire – I set mine to 20 GB),
- click on Finish and wait until the process ends
- Right click again on your machine in the left pane and select New -> Virtual Machine…
- Next and give it a name (e.g. LM212)
- Select Store the virtual machine in a different location if you wish
- Select Generation 2
- For Startup memory I set 1024 MB
- Check Use Dynamic Memory for this virtual machine.
- Connection can you set now or later – but you will need internet access from the virtual machine to finish some installation for Ventoy! – I chose here the Default Switch
- Select Attach a virtual hard disk later (because you can’t select a .vhd file for a 2. generation virtual machine)
- Click Finish
- With the newly created virtual machine selected click on Settings… in the right pane (Actions)
- Checkpoints: I don’t want it, so I deactivated this feature for my virtual machine
- Click on SCSI Controller -> Hard Drive and add the hard drive (.vhd) you created in the 2. step above
- Important! If you browse for the file, enter *.* into the File name field, as only .vhdx and .avhdx files would be shown be default!
- Under Security -> Enable Secure Boot -> Template you must select the second option: Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority (otherwise your 2. gen Linux virtual machine won’t boot)
- Click on SCSI Controller -> DVD Drive -> Add -> Image file and Browse for your downloaded Linux Mint 21.2 Xfce ISO
- Under Firmware you must make sure, that your VM will boot from the ISO image (rearrange the list if needed)
- If you’re done with the settings, click on Apply and OK in the lower right corner
- Connect
- Start
- Start Linux Mint 21.2 Xfce 64-bit
- Install the the operating system on the hard drive
- Open a browser inside the VM and go to https://github.com/ventoy/vtoyboot/releases
- Under Assets download the latest ISO – currently vtoyboot-1.0.30.iso
- Extract the contents of the ISO somewhere inside the VM and run vtoyboot.sh as root:
sudo sh vtoyboot.sh
documentation on the Ventoy website: https://ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html - Shutdown your VM – it’s almost ready to run from Ventoy
- Rename your VHD file like this: the filename extension must be .vtoy – e.g. LinuxMint212.vhd.vtoy
- From now on it’s ready to be used in Ventoy