DOS ain't dead

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I am barely aware that the word "Ventoy" exists.

That's about as much as I know about it

May I get opinions from those who have experience with FreeDos via Ventoy ?

> Searched these forums
>
> Found Zero hits
>
> I am barely aware that the word "Ventoy" exists.
>
> That's about as much as I know about it
>
> May I get opinions from those who have experience with FreeDos via Ventoy ?

Apparently, SeaTools .iso is bootable from it, although I have not tried that .iso or know where to find it.

As Ventoy is only UEFI, it seems to not support FreeDOS or any other MBR-based 16-bit DOS, such as MS-DOS 7.1, since Ventoy requires an EFI-enabled BIOS to run. (It won't run from an CSM-based traditional 16-bit BIOS).

Whether a FreeDOS .iso or an MSDOS7.1 .iso will boot through Ventools isn't listed in the "test list" with 855 verified .isos on the Venjoy site.

Ventoy looks like an excellent "iso boot management" utility, as one could have multiple isos on one memory stick and boot from them, to install to hard drive or possible SSD. However, being .isos, these probably won't run the operating systems directly, as the .iso image itself can't be mounted in a writable form (it's read-only, and its filesize can't grow or shrink upon demand).

> As Ventoy is only UEFI, it seems to not support FreeDOS or any other
> MBR-based 16-bit DOS, such as MS-DOS 7.1, since Ventoy requires an
> EFI-enabled BIOS to run. (It won't run from an CSM-based traditional 16-bit
> BIOS).

Ventoy is not "only UEFI". On the first page on its site it states:

> x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI are
> supported in the same way.

I haven't tried it on a legacy BIOS system yet, though.

For booting UEFI OSes on a system with UEFI bios it works great. Booting legacy OSes on an UEFI system didn't work as well for me. Don't rememeber the details as it was the last summer I last played with this.

> > As Ventoy is only UEFI, it seems to not support FreeDOS or any other
> > MBR-based 16-bit DOS, such as MS-DOS 7.1, since Ventoy requires an
> > EFI-enabled BIOS to run. (It won't run from an CSM-based traditional
> 16-bit
> > BIOS).
>
> Ventoy is not "only UEFI". On the first page on its site it states:
>
> > x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI
> are
> > supported in the same way.
>
> I haven't tried it on a legacy BIOS system yet, though.
>
> For booting UEFI OSes on a system with UEFI bios it works great. Booting
> legacy OSes on an UEFI system didn't work as well for me. Don't rememeber
> the details as it was the last summer I last played with this.

Sure, that's pretty much what I meant: VENTOY won't magically turn a UEFI-only system into a system that will boot legacy OSes like DOS, unfortunately. It will boot on legacy x86 BIOS systems, but only with legacy x86 .iso images. It apparently emulates a CD-ROM drive to boot the .iso and .img files. It also supports .WIM installation and grub Linux bootloaders (that's a huge benefit to those whose systems don't have CD-ROM boot support in their BIOS/UEFI firmware)

All the same, it would be *very* useful for a sysadmin who had to install / deploy multiple OSes on other systems, all through a single large-capacity USB stick.

VENTOY seems like a "little black bag" for OS installation stuff and can store many .isos without bothering with booting CDs or DVDs. It's a great tool, but of limited to no use for DOS users, especially on UEFI-only systems.

I also didn't hear about VENTOY till now, has it some advantages over e.g. RUFUS?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> I also didn't hear about VENTOY till now, has it some advantages over e.g.
> RUFUS?

Compared to RUFUS it's more of a multiboot tool. It will make two partitions on the media. The first one is a boot partition. The second one is where you place your ISOs. It can be formated in one of these file systems: FAT32/exFAT/NTFS/UDF/XFS/Ext2/Ext3/Ext4. You just place your ISOs on the second partition (they even can be in the subdirs) and that's all. When you boot it, it will get you a choice to boot them.

It can also be installed on a disk or SD card and also supports VHD, IMG and WIM disk images (personally haven't tested this yet).

Well Ventoy started with only Windows 7 support.
Now it supports Windows XP.
So i think Windows 9x and DOS is not far away.
There are known workaround already to boot DOS in GPT.

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Retrocomputing... a x86 DOS nut really!