i have a 32 gigs usb drive and, given that most isos are around 2-5 gigs, it’s such a shame to see nearly 30 gigs of perfectly good free space go to waste whenever i need to use it as a bootable drive. is there any way i can burn an iso image to the usb drive while still being able to use its free space?

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    4·
    5 hours ago

    If you don’t want Ventoy:

    Wipe the drive and partition it so the first partition is large enough for your ISO, then the second partition for your data spans the remaining space. I chose MBR over GPT so I could boot on both modern and legacy BIOS machines. Then dd your ISO to the first partition. Set the bootable flag on that partition if it isn’t already. Format the second partition with whatever filesystem you’d like.

    My Clonezilla recovery drive is set up like this, but it’s been a while so I might have forgotten something. Let me know if I did.

    Edit: this will not work with Windows ISOs and the data partition won’t show up in certain versions of Windows, in case anyone is wondering

    • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.brOP
      1·
      4 minutes ago

      it didnt work sadly. all i got was a blank screen

      edit: actually i think i got it right this time, i just needed to format it as an empty partition on gparted. brb

    • sixty@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      5 hours ago

      Wanna weigh in for whatever it’s worth.

      Was super excited when i found Ventoy. Had 2 partitions on the same flash drive, 1 for Ventoy and .isos and one for backing up various files. It was supposed to be the one to rule them all.

      When it came to actually using Ventoy to create a new Linux installation, the installation failed and the Ventoy partition became completely corrupted, rendering it unusable and the .isos were gone.

      Not sure what happened, but going with Ventoy is not really worth the hassle if I can reliably flash a usb drive that I know will work.

    • ogeist@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 hours ago

      This, I had hear of Ventoy for a long time. The idea is splendid you have a bootable drive where you can load all your OS ISO, tools and whatever it need to boot from a drive.

  • url@lemmy.world
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Sounds like you need to create two partitions and format them with relevant filesystems

    • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.brOP
      2·
      8 hours ago

      i thought about doing that, but i wasnt sure if that would get recognized as a bootable device (especially on my pc which is still has a bios instead of uefi). ill test it and come back to say if it worked or not

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      2·
      8 hours ago

      Alternatively, maybe just making a new folder on the USB’s root and putting stuff in there would suffice?

      Also if the OP uses Ventoy, from my tests you can put whatever in the partition for the ISOs without interfering in Ventoy’s functionalities.