I have an empty 1TB USB 3.0 SATA drive and would like to use it to keep installation media for several Linux distributions. Could I partition the drive and store multiple installers on it, or would a regular flash drive be more practical? I'm also considering creating larger partitions for testing different distributions directly from the same drive. Is there any technical reason this would not work, aside from possibly being slower than a flash drive or SSD?
4 Answers
The easiest solution is Ventoy. Install Ventoy on the external drive, then copy multiple ISO files onto it like ordinary files. When you boot from the drive, Ventoy shows a menu where you can choose which ISO to start. You can also keep other files on the drive. Performance should be fine over USB 3.0, although a SATA SSD in an enclosure may be faster than a typical flash drive.
Simply putting several ISOs on separate partitions will not automatically make them bootable. Writing an ISO with tools such as Rufus normally replaces the drive’s existing contents with one bootable image. To select among multiple images, you need a boot manager such as Ventoy or another multiboot tool.
You can use the 1TB drive, but you probably do not need to partition it into a different bootable partition for every distribution. A smaller dedicated USB drive would be enough for occasional installation media, while the larger drive could remain available for general storage. If you already have the drive, though, Ventoy makes using it for multiple installers practical.
Using the same drive to store installers and bootable ISO files is straightforward with Ventoy, but installing several full operating systems onto separate partitions on that same drive is more complicated. The installer may need to modify the partition table and install a bootloader, and it can be difficult to boot those installed systems reliably alongside the ISO storage. For experimenting with distributions, using virtual machines or a separate smaller SSD may be less troublesome.
That makes sense. I was thinking of an older drive where several operating system installers were already bootable, but I can see now that managing the bootloader and installed partitions is a separate problem.