I’ve got an older but still usable 1TB NVME drive in an enclosure (stable, not one of the older faulty ones that like to drop out). As a USB drive it’s actually amazing. Currently have ventoy on it to easily have various ISO’s available to install.
This thing is big enough I could theoretically directly install windows, various linux’s, various bsd’s on it, set up my tools/benchmarks once and just plug it in to do whatever testing on whatever system I want.
Does anyone here have experience with trying to set something like this up, or have a “best way forward” for getting everything involved to play nicely with each other and with arbitrary UEFI systems?
I know windows itself is going to be a pain point. Supposedly there are some third part ways to install it “portable” I’m going to try out this evening. And by try I mean install, wait, curse, reinstall, wait some more, curse some more and so on until I finally find that magic combination of variables that works.
I do have a ventoy and yumi drive both I believe are 64GB. I use the Ventoy drive on newer images as it works great with UEFI (even early systems). I have several older images including recovery tools on the yumi drive as I’ve had better luck with yumi on the bios booting images. Some computers will refuse to boot one or the other but I have yet to run into a system that fails to boot either one.
I think you’re on the right path with Ventoy. Have you seen their VtoyBoot plugin? It lets you boot virtual hard disk images on raw hardware. I use this myself with an 128gb usb stick and it works really nicely whenever I need something to troubleshoot a machine with.
Take a look here: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vtoyboot.html
They’ve got another one for Windows, altough I haven’t tried this myself and it does seem to have some limitations: https://www.ventoy.net/en/plugin_vhdboot.html
Co-worker at last job went down this road at some point and eventually reached the conclusion that it was just much, much easier to have multiple large USBs (256 Gb) each with their own OS.
I mean, trying to put Windows on the same drive as a Linux distro is bound to have issues, no? Even if you got it all installed and working, Windows is known for breaking things eventually for the other OSs
Windows normally won’t install onto a USB-connected drive. There is Windows-To-Go, or you can plug the drive into an internal m.2 slot to do a standard installation. Linux shouldn’t care. Though, preferably you should use UEFI for its superior bootloader arrangement/setup.