Distro + Ventoy = (Mild) Disaster

Distro Discussion & Help
,
1

When I create a bootable USB drive with Ventoy on a Kingston DataTraveler Max Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 1000R/900W USB stick 256GB - DTMAXA/256GB, the UPG installation automatically overwrites sdb and generates an error message (Unable to write EFI… or something similar).

Afterwards, the USB drive needs to be reformatted.

Tested on various PCs (Fujitsu fanless G3240 with SATA SSD in AHCI mode, HP Prodesk 705 Desktop Mini with NVMe (AMD), HP DM 600 with NVMe…).

Presumably, the issue is that while the USB drive is bootable, Ventoy then emulates an SSD that the ISO installer tries to overwrite.

Interesting. Solution? Use Rufus, not Ventoy. :frowning:

2

Well… just tested this USB-Stick with Rufus + ISO (w/o Ventoy). Same problem.

Apparently, it´s this type of stick being recognized as sdb.

The reason to use it? Sustained write speed is >200MByte/s

3

Linux can’t tell the difference between a USB stick and a USB hard drive. At a low level it can distinguish between SCSI, SATA, and USB, but they are all treated as SCSI when it comes to file system mounts, and device file names.

4

But why does the current ISO try and overwrite the stick? Why doesn´t it use sda?

Some hours ago I installed Debian 13 from same stick on same machine → Works fine.

5

Checked again with a cheap Sandisk 32GB stick: Installation works just fine.

What might be the difference to the 256 Kingston?

6

What gets allocated as sda or sdb tends to be random. I suspect it is a question of which one indicates ready, first, in the power up sequence. My experience isn’t in relation to clean machine installs, but rather ordinary boots, of Debian 12. The mounts get the right devices, because they use the disk GUID, but it is hit and miss as to whether the root file system ends up as sda or sdb. This is with just SATA devices