How Ventoy actually boots an ISO
Six short steps that describe the whole pipeline, from the moment the firmware hands off control until your chosen system is running.
- 1
Firmware hands off to Ventoy
When the machine boots the USB stick, the firmware loads Ventoy's small bootloader — either the legacy MBR path or a signed EFI binary on modern systems.
- 2
GRUB2-based menu is drawn
Ventoy uses a customized GRUB2 to scan the exFAT/NTFS data partition, list all image files it recognizes, and render them as a menu.
- 3
You pick an image
Highlight an ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD/EFI, hit Enter, and Ventoy hands control to the correct chain-loading strategy for that file type.
- 4
Image is mapped, not extracted
Instead of copying files to RAM or another partition, Ventoy exposes the image as a virtual disk so the guest kernel reads it natively.
- 5
Plugins can transform the boot
Persistence, auto-install answer files, driver injection and password gates are applied through the plugin JSON before the kernel starts.
- 6
Guest OS takes over
From this point everything looks identical to booting from a dedicated USB — but you can reboot and pick a different image any time.