Are you still using Rufus to create bootable USB drives? Are you frustrated that you need a separate USB drive for every operating system you want to boot? Well, let me introduce you to Ventoy—a free, open-source alternative to Rufus that lets you store as many operating systems as your USB drive has room for and boot into any of them with ease.

Limitations of using Rufus

Traditional bootable USB tools force you to choose

Rufus is one of the most popular tools for creating bootable USB drives. You open the app, select an ISO, choose your USB drive, click Start, wait a few minutes, and your bootable installer is ready.

The downside is that every time you flash a new ISO, Rufus reformats the drive and replaces its existing contents. If you later want to install a different operating system, you’ll have to repeat the entire process from scratch. And if you want to carry two bootable operating systems—say, Windows 11 and Ubuntu—you’ll typically need two separate USB drives.

That’s exactly the limitation Ventoy eliminates.

How Ventoy makes your USB multifunctional

Unlock your thumb drive’s true potential

Instead of flashing an ISO every time you need a bootable drive, you install Ventoy onto your USB drive once. After that, you simply copy ISO files onto it the same way you’d copy movies, documents, or photos.

When you boot from the drive, Ventoy detects every compatible ISO and presents them in a boot menu. That means a single USB drive can hold both a Windows 11 ISO and an Ubuntu ISO. You can add more ISOs by copying them to the drive or remove them by simply deleting the files. Managing bootable operating systems becomes as easy as managing any other file.

The best part, however, is that your USB drive continues to work like a normal storage device. Once you’ve copied over your bootable ISOs, any remaining space can be used to store documents, photos, videos, or anything else you’d normally keep on a USB drive.

Here’s a quick look at how I use my Ventoy USB drive.

Keep every operating system installer on one USB drive

Your entire OS collection fits in your pocket now

Arguably, the biggest advantage of Ventoy is being able to carry every operating system I regularly use on a single USB drive. Instead of maintaining separate flash drives, I keep Windows 11 alongside several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Linux Mint. Whenever I want to try a new distro, I just download the ISO, copy it to the drive, and Ventoy automatically detects it the next time I boot.

This also makes distro hopping much easier. I no longer have to decide which operating system deserves my only bootable USB drive. They all live on the same drive, and I simply choose the one I need from Ventoy’s boot menu.

Every disaster-recovery tool you own, always on hand

Beyond storing bootable ISOs, I also keep several PC recovery tools on my Ventoy USB drive. While you can often boot into an operating system’s built-in recovery environment, I find it useful to have dedicated tools ready to go:

• Clonezilla: Creates a complete image of a drive before I attempt a risky repair, giving me a backup if something goes wrong.
• GParted: Lets me resize, move, create, and recover disk partitions.
• MemTest86+: The gold standard for diagnosing faulty RAM.

You can also add antivirus rescue disks, manufacturer recovery images, firmware update ISOs, or any other bootable utilities you rely on. The idea is that instead of carrying multiple USB drives and trying to remember which one contains which tool, you can keep everything on a single USB drive.

Carry your favorite portable apps everywhere

The apps you use, always in your pocket

After copying all my bootable ISOs and recovery tools to my Ventoy USB drive, I still typically have plenty of free space left. To make the most of it, I keep a collection of portable Windows apps that run without installation. I primarily use them for troubleshooting.

My toolkit includes the Sysinternals Suite for digging into what a Windows system is actually doing, HWiNFO for quickly identifying hardware and monitoring system sensors, and CrystalDiskInfo for checking drive health.

I also keep Everything, which gives me near-instant access to any file on the system. If I need to quickly locate something on a Windows PC, it’s the first tool I open.

Finally, I carry a portable copy of Firefox. If I need to browse the web on another computer, I can use my own browser with my extensions, bookmarks, and settings already available.

And the best part—it still works as a normal USB drive

All that, and it still functions as a regular flash drive

Credit: David J. Buck/How-To Geek

This is probably my favorite thing about Ventoy. Even after filling the drive with operating system installers, recovery tools, and portable apps, I can still use it like any other USB drive—as long as there’s free space left.

For example, I use a 64GB USB drive. Around 30GB is occupied by operating system installers, recovery tools, and portable apps, leaving the rest available for movies, TV shows, manga, game ROMs, ebooks, and any other files I want to carry with me.

Thanks to Ventoy, my bootable USB drive is still my everyday portable storage device. Instead of dedicating it to a single operating system installer, I’m getting full use out of the storage I paid for.

Ventoy has completely replaced Rufus for me

Rufus is a good tool, and it does exactly what it promises. But its narrow focus leaves most of your USB drive unused. A 128GB flash drive holding a single 6GB installer is a lot of wasted space. And with the current sky-high storage prices, getting the most out of the drives you already own actually matters.

This is what makes Ventoy such an important app right now. It turns a single high-capacity USB drive into an OS installer, a recovery toolkit, a portable app collection, and everyday storage—all at the same time. Once you’ve used it that way, going back to reflashing a USB drive for every operating system feels redundant.