Sometimes you've got to boot into a certain operating system (often from a
certain company that rhymes with Lara Croft). Or maybe you just want to try out
different distros? But you want the real meat, not just some virtual machine
experience without GPU. Oh boy, you are going to like what I'm about to tell
you.
But first: I have both: a laptop and a desktop PC. And while my PC mainboard
(MSI B550-A PRO) does have a really nice feature called M-FLASH, which allows
you to simply put a new BIOS version onto a USB flash drive, then stick it into
your mainboard and woosh: the mainboard simply does it all automagically;
unfortunatelly my laptop does not. It's an Ideapad 5 (Mod. 15ABA7) and it
requires you to run an .EXE file to update your BIOS, which is very unfortunate
if you don't have Windows installed on your machine. See where this is going?
So basically I was forced to install Windows, even though I really don't want or
need it on my machine, just to run a simple executable with less than 20 MB for
a few seconds to do a little update. Windows does not have a "live system" like
most linux distros do. And even then: Would you trust that live system with
flashing your BIOS chip? So it had to be a fully fledged install.
All that meant I had to
- clone an image of my laptop's drive to a separate storage
- wipe the hard drive
- install windows onto the laptop
- run the bios update
- wipe the hard drive again (this actually felt good)
- clone the original image back to restore everything
Besides the fact this is all very annoying: it also meant I had to create a
windows boot stick first. Aaand, since I don't trust Windows with any of the
cloning / file system stuff, I also needed some Linux boot stick as well.
Long story short: I tried so many things to make the Windows boot stick work,
but it just wouldn't! Until I finally discovered
[Ventoy](https://www.ventoy.net). It's dead simple: You download the source
files (in my case for Linux), which has less than 20 MB in total. After
extraction you can run the GUI using `VentoyGUI.x86_64` and select a flash
drive. The rest happens automagically.
Once your drive has been prepared, it will contain two partitions: A big
partition at the start and a small partition (that actually contains Ventoy) at
the end. You can now just put all your .iso files of pretty much any OS anywhere
in that first partition and Ventoy should be able to find them and present them
to you in a boot menu. And yes, this also works out-of-the-box with Windows 10
and 11 images, I tested it. Just a great tool and I can really recommend having
a boot stick laying around somewhere ready to be filled with ISOs, just in case
you need one.
