Ventoy Fails To Boot on i386

[Cdr. Data]

I've installed Ventoy onto two different USB drives and both fail to boot on an i386.  I get "GR" in the upper left corner, then an error message about an invalid file system, and then it dumps me into a GRUB recovery command prompt.  The USB drives were 16 GB and 2 GB.  Both written successfully with the Windows version of the installer.

I was able to get the drives to boot on a newer x64 system and everything appeared to work properly there.  I was building the USB drive to stick some utilities on, like Clonezilla and DBAN, so it's not super-critical for it to work on "antique" hardware.  It didn't work and I'm trying to understand why.  I read the documentation pretty carefully and didn't see anything that indicated it wouldn't work on x32.

Thanks for any clarification...

[longpanda]

Indeed, I didn't test Ventoy in pure i386 machine(I don't have one).
As I known, with old machine, there are USB-HDD/USB-ZIP/USB-CDROM concept and Ventoy need USB-HDD mode.
Beside, there is some old machine need the 1st partition MUST start at sector63 (Ventoy start at sector 2048) ...
There is also some BIOS has access limitation for USB drive ..
...

[Cdr. Data]

Indeed, I didn't test Ventoy in pure i386 machine(I don't have one).
As I known, with old machine, there are  USB-HDD/USB-ZIP/USB-CDROM concept and Ventoy need USB-HDD mode.
Beside, there is some old machine need the 1st partition MUST start at sector63 (Ventoy start at sector 2048) ...
There is also some BIOS has access limitation for USB drive ..
...

When I enter the boot menu, I'm prompted to start from a USB hard drive, and that's what I select.

I don't know what filesystem driver it's trying to use, but there isn't a fat.mod, ext2.mod, or normal.mod in the grub/i386-pc folder.  Could it be missing a driver it needs?

I mounted the drive on one of my Linux boxes and poked around in the 2nd partition.  I couldn't figure out what the grub.cnf was doing - that's way over my head! Nor could I find img files to tell it to boot from.

I tried both EFI and GPT partition styles.  The GPT partition style just displayed "GR" and locked up.  At least EFI gave me a prompt, not that I was able to figure out much with it.  This laptop was made before EFI was out, so something may be confusing it.

Is this something that could be tested in a VM?

Thanks,

Bob