Saturday 14 November 2020

Latest Ventoy v1.0.28 will not work with E2B!

 LongPanda (the developer of Ventoy) has changed Ventoy so that it will only work on MBR-partitioned disks if that disk was prepared using the official Ventoy tools. The second partition must be exactly 65536  sectors long now.

Recently, I received some special error reports, which finally proved to be the cause of the non-standard Ventoy environment. Especially use Ventoy in a single partition environment.
Although Ventoy displays Unofficial's label information, users will not care and will still think it is a Ventoy problem. Ventoy has been an overall design from the beginning, and has not considered integration into other bootloader or partition environments. Ventoy's verification and subsequent development of new features will not consider this non-standard usage. Therefore, I decided to prohibit the use of Ventoy in a non-standard environment and no longer accept requests for deregulation. Of course, this is just the default behavior of Ventoy. Ventoy is still 100% open source. If you want to apply Ventoy in your own environment, you can fork a branch and modify the source code implementation.

 

This means that v1.0.28 (and all future versions?) will not run from an E2B drive.

If you would like to be able to continue to add Ventoy to E2B, please feel free to contact LongPanda and request that he changes his mind!

See here for more details of this recent change.

For now you need to use 1.0.27 (see here for details).

For the changes in Ventoy which check the partitions for validity - see the new code here (starting line 509).

If you wish, you can run the newer versions of Ventoy using MBR-booting only by using an older version of core.img, however UEFI-booting to Ventoy will still be blocked.


Footnote (2021): I have now recompiled Ventoy as 'Ventoy for Easy2Boot' with the restrictive code removed. Also, you can easily convert an E2B USB drive into an official Ventoy USB drive (original unmodified Ventoy) by making three different image files of 'official' Ventoy from the latest build of Ventoy and 'switching' one of them into Partition 2 (uses Ventoy grub2 boot code too).

8 comments:

  1. One had the impression from the beginning that longpanda does not like that Ventoy was integrated into E2B. You have done a great job providing E2B + agFM + Ventoy. But E2B + agFM can boot pretty much any ISO because of its versatility and has other advantages. I can't imagine that so many E2B + agFM + Ventoy users report a bug in Ventoy to longpanda without having tested it with an original Ventoy Flash drive. But still too bad, E2B + agFM + Ventoy was a great job.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I contacted longpanda many times, he not reply so far.
    Not all developers collaborate like you Steve.
    He even don't want to ask users if they using official or unofficial release,
    So what the f*** is benefit of (Unofficial) message then?? Shit !!!
    No more begging!
    BTW, rebuild custom Ventoy from source is god idea, but need a lot of hard work:

    https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/blob/master/DOC/BuildVentoyFromSource.txt

    Cheers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, I can rebuild Ventoy and release my own version which would not say 'Unofficial' - then LongPanda will get problem reports from people and he will ask 'Does it say Unoffical' and they wil say 'No' - so he will think that they are using his version :-)

      Delete
    2. Ventoy - E2B - Version

      Delete
  3. You could rename project to completely different name (e.g vE2B, Etoy, EasyToy..etc).
    So people CAN'T recognize it.
    In this way, author will not get upset by users reports.
    This will make your E2B project more powerful.

    Good luck bro.

    ReplyDelete
  4. For me, stability of Ventoy is very enough,
    So you could make identical copy of Ventoy source, but with completely different name,
    of course without warning or unofficial messages. You could update your custom release whenever Ventoy source updated from time to time.

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  5. Actually, you can find a way to integrate the grub part of ventoy into grub2, and then you can using it in grub2-filemanager to load a specific ISO, like I did before. But it took up too much effort and ventoy relies on a specific partition structure, so I eventually gave up on it.

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  6. Altoy will be nice name for E2B Ventoy.......... E2B+agFM+Altoy

    ReplyDelete