I'm running Linux Ubuntu 24 on an old AMD HP laptop and recently upgraded to a new 2TB SSD. I've had trouble with Ventoy, which worked fine for me in the past. I want to know if it's possible to partition my external SSD into four usable bootable partitions. I have been using tools like GParted to manage the SSD partitions (i.e., sdb1, sdb2, etc.), but I've found that Balena Etcher, MKUSB, and similar tools only recognize the SSD as one drive (sdb) and overwrite it entirely with a single distro, like Mint. How can I solve this problem?
1 Answer
Image burn tools usually format the whole drive before writing, meaning they can't write to specific partitions. If you want to emulate Ventoy on your SSD, you might need to install your preferred distro directly onto the SSD, then manually create a GRUB boot entry for each ISO you want to boot from. Check out this guide on setting up GRUB to boot ISO files: linuxbabe.com/desktop-linux/boot-from-iso-files-using-grub2-boot-loader
So if I understand correctly, I can store the ISO files in subdirectories and then edit the GRUB configuration to include them in the boot menu. But how would I point to a specific directory, like /mint on the sdb2 partition?