Author(s)

Lunear

Info

This guide provides a thorough walk-through of flashing a Linux ISO into a pendrive to enable local installation through Ventoy

Warning

Flashing a USB drive will completely erase all contents within, thus make sure to check or back-up necessary files/documents before proceeding

What is Flashing?

Flashing a USB drive enables us to run local ISO on the machine, which might be used for OS installation, rescue environment, etc... In the case of Linux, flashing an ISO onto a drive would be the very first step in starting your journey.

Note

Upon flashing a drive, the USB drive will not function as a storage device anymore, and will only serve the purpose to boot live environments.

How to Flash?

There are many tools available for this purpose, including but not limited to Rufus, Balena Etcher, Ventoy, and Fedora Media Writer.

Why Ventoy?

This guide will use Ventoy as it supports multiple ISO images on a single USB drive, compatible in both Windows and Linux, and most importantly, open source.

Other great options for this purpose would be Rufus (only available on Windows) and Fedora Media Writer (only available on Linux).

• Download Ventoy from the official website

  • For Windows, install .zip file and unzip the file
  • For Linux, install tar.gz file and unzip the file

• Installation

  • For Windows, locate Ventoy2Disk.exe and run it.
  • For Linux, locate VentoyGUI.x86_64 and run it.
  • After executing the files, a GUI should appear. Select the correct disk to format, and Install.

Great! Now you have flashed your drive and Ventoy installed on the current USB drive.

Your next steps would be to download ISOs from the distribution's official website

• Fedora
• Arch
• Debian
• Ubuntu

Done!

After installing the ISO(s) desired, simply drag the ISO file into the flashed drive as Ventoy will automatically locate the ISO files. Your drive is ready to boot!

Changelog

7/12/25, 4:59 PM

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• 6f292-Enhance markdown formatting for consistency across documentationon 7/12/25
• b8933-Using fewer tags for better tag sorting.on 7/5/25
• 54796-Finalize flashing guideon 6/30/25
• 51736-Flashing guide completedon 6/30/25
• 95912-Flashing guide created and link from debian/ubuntu updatedon 6/26/25