Running EasyOS under Ventoy is easy-peasy

[HarveyH]

What you will need:
USBImager
A Ventoy-ready drive
A smaller drive to temporarily hold EasyOS
Some time.

This was done with windows, My setup is Ventoy on my 2nd internal 240G SSD.
Your setup may vary. What's important is that you have two drives: a big one for Ventoy and a smaller one to temporarily hold EasyOS.
Here's how I did it.

1) Using USBImager, I wrote the EasyOS img file to my 64 Gig Flashdrive.

If the flash drive does *NOT* boot on your system due to Secure Boot being enabled.
2) Boot up Ventoy and hit f4
3) Choose "find EFi64x" (or whatever it is) The EasyOS flash drive booted up and did its setup voodoo expanding the storage partition and whatever else.

UPDATE:
or ... Press F2 and look for the 7 meg partition. On my system, it is hd0.
dig down to bootEFI64 (or whatever it is)

4) Do 2 and 3 a few more times just to be sure it all works
You could stop right there if you want. You have an EasyOS that boots under Ventoy. It works, but let's keep going.
5) Back in Windows, Use UBSImager to write the the Flashdrive into an .img file.
Done! Rename it to EasyOS.img and put it onto my internal 240-gig Ventoy drive. The EasyOS file is 64 Gigs, but that's OK. It works just like the Flash drive did complete with the "save" icon and it's way faster.

If it *DOES Boot* natively
2) Boot the flash drive and let it do it's voodoo.
3) Back in Windows, Use UBSImager to write the the Flashdrive into an .img file.
Done! Rename it to EasyOS.img and put it onto my internal 240-gig Ventoy drive. The EasyOS file is 64 Gigs, but that's OK. It works just like the Flash drive did complete with the "save" icon and it's way faster.

The only important part is having a flash drive the size that you want the finished EasyOS img file to be.

TLDR:
Write the EasyOS img file to a 2nd flash drive.
Boot the Flashdrive in some way and let it do it's setup voodoo.
Write the entire EasyOS flash drive into an img file and put that img file into Ventoy.

Updated for clarity. 25/Oct/2023

[wiak]

That's a great example, and the simple end result of using final created image. Usually just get simple reports on using ready-made live isos so this is a very useful post to me.

I don't have time (or inclination) to install all available forum distros in their recommended conventional ways, but I do keep a Ventoy stick that your explanation makes more useful for me.

[HarveyH]

Glad to help. I'm also glad my "tutorial" was understandable. The only con I can think of is that you are "stuck" with an EasyOS image file the size of your flash drive. This may be too big or too small for some people. Having a 240 Gig Ventoy drive,the 64 gig file is acceptable, but I wish I had a 16 Gig flashdrive that I could have done this with.

Barry did an excellent job with EasyOS. It works great out of the box and to me, the deal-making functions are that it runs 100% in RAM at all times and saves nothing unless you tell it to; either on demand or at shutdown/reboot. That gives me a FAAAAST system to play with and if I install something that I really don't want (only playing around), I just don't save the changes. Also if I visit a por... I mean a knitting site, yeah that's it; knitting tutorials, I don't care if I pick up any malware. I just don't save changes on shut-down and all the cookies and shit go away.

TYVM, Barry

[HarveyH]

I guess I'll add one more comment out of fairness. If you are a Linux guru, which I am *NOT*, there's a more elegant way to resize and set up the EasyOS img file using the dd command and some esoteric Juju. My way is slower but much easier. The entire process takes about 15 minutes and you don't have to muck about with the d(estroy)d(isk) command.

Edited for clarity

[HarveyH]

My first post has been edited for clarity

[HarveyH]

Edited again for another way to boot the EasyOS flashdrive.

Press F2 and look for the 7 meg fat partiton.
Dig down into it for the bootEFI64 file