Ventoy need to get some information according to the drive letter.ģ.2.1. The 1st partition must have a drive letter. It's also OK if you already has enough unused space (32MB+) after the 1st partition.(Then we don't need to shrink the 1st partition anymore).ģ.1.5. The non-destructive shrink need some free space. There must be some free space in the 1st partition. This is because Windows APIs only support to shrink NTFS.įor FAT32 you can do a non-destructive convert to NTFS firstly.ģ.1.4. The 1st partition must contains NTFS filesystem.

In Windows, the 1st partition is start at 1MB by default.ģ.1.3. The 1st partition must start at 1MBīoth MBR and GPT must meet this requirement to match Ventoy's disk layout. Ventoy need to insert a new VTOYEFI partition, so it will occupy a partition table.įor MBR partition style, if there already exist 4 partitions in your disk, then it can not do non-destructive installation.įor GPT partition style, if there already exist 128 partitions in your disk, then it can not do non-destructive installation.ģ.1.2.

There must be a free partition table to use in the disk. Normally the following conditions need to be met:ģ.1.1. Ventoy will automatically check the device and will not do the non-destructive installation if some conditions cannot be met. The mechanism of nondestructive installation is very simple. You can not do and don't need nondestructive installation if the disk already installed with Ventoy, the menu will be disabled. So don't use it on a disk which contains MBR bootloader.ģ. The MBR and the first 1MB area before the 1st partition will be overwritten. Ventoy will try to ensure the safety of existing data, but it is strongly recommended to back up first for very important data.Ģ.

Since 1.0.59, Ventoy provides experimental support for non-destructive installation in Ventoy2Disk.exe.ġ. In some cases you may have put a lot of files in the USB stick and don't want to backup and restore data. By default Ventoy will format the USB stick when install.

Ventoy alternatives