Memdisk Mode

• Memdisk Mode

In normal mode, Ventoy will only read the iso file at booting time, and only read the content needed for boot. Ventoy works well in normal case, but not 100%. On some machines (especially in Legacy BIOS mode) there may be problems.
In Memdisk mode, Ventoy will load the whole ISO.IMG file into memory and boot it. This will take up some additional memory, but with higher success rate to boot.

Attention: Since 1.0.83, the hotkey for Memdisk was changed from F1 to Ctrl+d.

• Scope of Memdisk mode

The following conditions must be met to use memdisk mode:
1. Only ISO and some IMG files are supported in Memdisk mode.
2. The ISO file can't be too big, normally less than 1GB
3. Most importantly, there is no need to mount the ISO file after boot

So not every ISO file is suitable for memdisk mode.
Memdisk mode is very suitable for WinPE (without external programs), various Live CD, Vmware ESXi, Memtest86 and all other small distros.

• How to use

Just press Ctrl+d before you select the iso file in ventoy's boot menu. (Press again to restore the default mode)
If you don't want to press Ctrl+d every time, you can also use Auto Memdisk Plugin.

• Screen Tip

Since ventoy-1.0.12, there will be a red Memdisk word at the top of the hotkey tip when you press Ctrl+d.


If you use a custom theme, the following hbox should be defined in the theme.txt to show the red tip.

+ hbox{ 
    left = 30%
    top = 95%-25
    width = 10%
    height = 25
    + label {text = "@VTOY_MEM_DISK@" color = "red" align = "left"} 
}