Multifunction USB SSD (USB Swiss Army Knife)

[CsIxy]

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Hello Everyone!
I apologize for my poor knowledge of English, my text would probably be a little more clearer in Hungarian.
I have long wanted to create a tool that can act as a storage medium and boot many iso installers, and it also has an installed Linux system. So there is no need to use installer iso + persistence. In addition, the installed linux system can be updated. I think with the help of ventoy-1.0.15 this is almost entirely feasible.

I did the following.
I have a Sony 111 gigabit USB SSD.
I installed the new version with the instruction "sudo sh Ventoy2Disk.sh -i -r 32768 -g / dev / sdb". I then made a copy of the EFI partition VTOYEFI / EFI / BOOT / BOOTX64.EFI file.
Then I formatted the dev / sdb3 reserved partition into an ext4 partition using Gparted.

Now I have installed a linux system in UEFI mode using linuxmint-20-xfce-64bit.iso. Dev / sdb3 was mounted as / and dev / sdb2 was mounted as / boot / efi. The installer has repeatedly warned that this will not be good! In the meantime, I had to remove the boot, efi flag from the original efi partition on my computer to proceed with the installation. He finally succeeded and did it. Now Legacyy mode can be used to boot ventoy and UEFI mode to boot installed linux as a system. Because of this, I deleted the contents of the VTOYEFI / EFI / BOOT / folder and rewrote the previously saved ventoy BOOTX64.EFI file into it.

In the end, ventoy can be booted in Legacy mode, and installed Linux can be booted in UEFI mode (because it can boot from the EFI / ubuntu folder). By selecting “boot from efi file” from the “BIOS”, starting the VTOYEFI / EFI / BOOT / BOOTX64.EFI file, the ventoy starts in UEFI mode.

So far, I'm very happy about that.

I even copy the i386-pc folder from the usr / lib / grub folder to the boot / grub folder on the installed system with its contents. If I boot this system with a grub from another Legacy linux system, I will plug in a small flash drive and install the grub in the auxiliary flash drive (for example sudo grub-install dev / sdX), then update-grub or grub-mkconfig -o and the system Legacy mode can then be booted using the auxiliary flash drive.

I know it was pretty DIY like that, but maybe I gave you a tiny idea for the “how to proceed” aspect.

Thank you for your patience! … Best Regards … CsI

[longpanda]

Good experience.

One suggestion:
I think it's better to create part3 for /boot and part4 for / to your linuxmint system. Then normally there will be two boot option in your UEFI BIOS.

[CsIxy]

Good experience.

One suggestion:
I think it's better to create part3 for /boot and part4 for /  to your linuxmint system. Then normally there will be two boot option in your UEFI BIOS.

Thanks! I will try your suggestion.

[CsIxy]

Thanks for the Ventoy Menu Extension Plugin! If I paste this into the ventoy_grub.cfg file:

menuentry “MyLinux Frugal Install” {
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set c03blablabla7-acc1712757cc
linux /boot/vmlinuz-5.4.0-42-generic root = UUID = c03blablablablabla712757cc ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-5.4.0-42-generic
}

Then my installed linux system will boot!
Great happiness !!!! With Legacy, me no longer need an auxiliary flash drive to boot the installed system.

But conversely, I don't know how ... Can you help me? If I can start Grub on my installed linux, what do I need to enter in the linux and initrd line to install Ventoy Frugal?

Because there are so many kinds of BIOS. In the case of UEFI there is when this is successfully booted there is when the other.