I'm running Linux Ubuntu 24 on an older AMD HP laptop with a brand new 2TB SSD. I've had some trouble with Ventoy lately, even though it worked well for over a year. Now, I'm looking into partitioning my 2TB external SSD so that I can set up around four bootable partitions. I've used partition tools like GParted to create the partitions and they show up as sdb1, sdb2, etc. The issue arises when I try using Balena Etcher or MKUSB; these tools seem to overwrite the entire SSD instead of allowing me to write to specific partitions—essentially, I end up putting just one Linux distro on it, like Mint. Any advice on how to handle this?
1 Answer
Most image burning tools format the whole drive first before writing an ISO, meaning they can't write to individual partitions directly. If you want to replicate something like Ventoy on your SSD, you might want to install your preferred distro directly and then manually configure a GRUB boot entry for each ISO you want to boot. Check out this guide on [managing ISO files with GRUB](https://www.linuxbabe.com/desktop-linux/boot-from-iso-files-using-grub2-boot-loader) for more detail.
So, I think I can just put the ISO files in separate subdirectories and edit the GRUB file to create menu options for those ISOs when I use the boot menu. But how could I specify the paths if the ISOs are on an SSD? For example, how do I point to the /mint directory on the sdb2 partition?