ventoy2disk

ventoy to disk revisited (https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy)

manual installation of Ventoy in BIOS mode. This mode remains perfectly functional on a UEFI machine, which is not necessarily the case with UEFI mode on a BIOS machine.

prerequisites

• boot.img (Ventoy)
• core.img.xz (Ventoy)
• VTOYEFI.part.img.xz
• bash with root access
• dd
• exfat-utils (Debian)
• fdisk
• grep (installation script)
• umount
• util-linux (Debian)
• xz-utils (Debian)

the image of the partition VTOYEFI.part.img.xz is derived from that of ventoy.disk.img.xz.

partitioning

TARGET=/dev/todo
umount $TARGET*
BLOCKS=$( blockdev --getsz $TARGET )
fdisk $TARGET <<~~~~~
o
n
p
1
2048
$(( BLOCKS - 65537 ))
t
7
n
p
2
$(( BLOCKS - 65536 ))
$(( BLOCKS - 1 ))
t
2
ef
a
1
w
~~~~~

installation of Ventoy components

dd if=boot.img of=$TARGET bs=1 count=446
xzcat core.img.xz | dd of=$TARGET count=2047 seek=1
xzcat VTOYEFI.part.img.xz | dd of=$TARGET count=65536 seek=$(( BLOCKS - 65536 ))

random serial number

this step is optional.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=$TARGET seek=384 bs=1 count=16
dd if=/dev/urandom of=$TARGET seek=440 bs=1 count=4

ExFAT formatting of the first partition

depending on the device, the first partition may not named p1 but simply 1 (for example /dev/sde1 with /dev/sde).

lsblk $TARGET
# adapt the next command with the results of the previous command (see note above)
mkfs.exfat -n Ventoy ${TARGET}p1