Solved Boot and persistence on (HD1,1) [SOLVED]

[marco.benatti]

Hi all,
for practical and performance reasons I am trying to copy from my USB driver .ISO and casper-rw files on the target (temporary) computer first partition (ext3)
I manage to boot successfully by F2 browsing the disk, but not giving persistency.
I tried to manually add "persistence" to the boot command line, but it does not work (it is not a FAT partition)
then I tried to configure ventoy.conf file adding (hd1,1) to the path, but as you see it is parsed as 'invalid'
Any further ideas ?
cheers
"persistence":[
        {
            "image": "/YUMI/Linux-ISOs/linuxmint-21.1-mate-64bit.iso",
            "backend":[
                "/YUMI/Linux-ISOs/persistence.dat"
            ]
        },
{
            "image": "(hd1,1)/boot/boot-isos/linuxmint-21.1-mate-64bitHDD.iso",
            "backend":[
                "(hd1,1)/casper-rw"
            ]
        },
        {
            "image": "/YUMI/Linux-ISOs/linuxmint-21.1-xfce-64bit.iso",
            "backend":[
                "/YUMI/Linux-ISOs/casper-rw"
            ]
        }
    ]

[Steve2926]

Because disk numbers change from system to system or if you change the number of disks in your system, you cannot specify a drive by using a drive number.
Instead, Ventoy must use a vlnk file which is like a shortcut in windows which specifies which disk and path.
So I think you need to make vlnk files and place those on your Ventoy USB drive.
See https://ventoy.net/en/doc_vlnk.html

It is not clear from the documentation how it finds the iso file - i.e. does it search all drives and use the first one it finds (in which case it may not boot the one we want if there are multiple drives with same iso files) or if more than one file with same path is found on more than one drive, does it give a choice of which one to use?

P.S. This is covered in my eBook (PDF) - 'Getting started with Ventoy' ;-)

[longpanda]

If you only want to boot iso file in local disk, you can use F2 browser mode.
If you want to boot iso file in local disk and at the same time specify a persistence dat file also in local disk, then you must use vlnk file.
That is :
1. create a vlnk file which point to the iso file in local disk.
2. create a vlnk file which point to the dat persistence file in local disk.
3. copy the two vlnk files to Ventoy USB drive.
4. Set persistence in ventoy.json (the .vlnk.iso use the .vlnk.dat file as persistence file).
5. Boot Ventoy and select the .vlnk.iso file to boot.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_vlnk.html

[marco.benatti]

If you only want to boot iso file in local disk, you can use F2 browser mode.
If you want to boot iso file in local disk and at the same time specify a persistence dat file also in local disk, then you must use vlnk file.
That is :
1. create a vlnk file which point to the iso file in local disk.
2. create a vlnk file which point to the dat persistence file in local disk.
3. copy the two vlnk files to Ventoy USB drive.
4. Set persistence in ventoy.json (the .vlnk.iso use the .vlnk.dat file as persistence file).
5. Boot Ventoy and select the .vlnk.iso file to boot.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_vlnk.html

Thanks for your indications. I managed to do exactly what I needed.
Sorry I did not get the link concept before.
Marco