It is recommended to download the latest version. I didn’t have a “Windows To Go” or a windows machine to use, but I wanted to do the BIOS upgrade.Now that the Windows 11 image is downloading, we have to download the tar.gz file from Ventoy’s website. Reboot your computer and use F12 to access the boot menu (this can take a few tries to get the timing right. I just kept pressing F12 as the logo appears on boot).Īnd inspired by this success, I tried to run the WD Dashboard software to update the firmware in my WD SN850 SSD I have installed. Unfortunately WD Dashboard doesn’t run this way.

It cannot run by command line, it needs to install to a GUI and since the Windows installer doesn’t have this type of environment, it errors out with a “this version of Windows is not supported” error. I previously ran it in a Windows To Go drive, but WTG is so limiting. The entire drive gets taken up and can’t be used for other things.

Also WTG can only be written by Windows, and a fast Windows PC at that.

I won’t have this very soon once I sell my old laptop. I have Windows 10 in a VM but it’s misconfigured and can’t access USB. I would much rather have Windows run off a Ventoy drive so I could also use it for Linux installs. HEY WAIT! You can! You can install a Windows VM. It functions as a full Windows install on my Framework, doesn’t alter my Linux install on my SSD and lets me do all the other things you can do with Ventoy like add other Linux install environments.

This all worked well with warm reboots, but I shutdown and did a cold boot and now I discover Windows didn’t play nice. Windows did install its own boot manager and place it in front of my Linux GRUB install, so I could no longer boot and got a Windows boot manager error message since the Ventoy USB was unplugged.įortunately this was easy enough to fix, press F12 on boot and select your Linux drive.

Ventoy for windows