BootForge

Boot a PC

Booting a PC

Using your finished drive to boot a real computer — the boot menu, the Ventoy menu, and what to expect.

Your drive is prepared and has images on it. Now boot a computer from it.

The steps

  1. Plug the drive into the PC. Use a port directly on the machine — a rear USB-A port on a desktop is the most reliable. Avoid hubs, docks, and adapters for booting.
  2. Power on (or restart) the PC and immediately start tapping its boot-menu key. This is a per-maker key (often F12, F9, Esc, or F8). Look yours up in Boot menu keys.
  3. Choose your BootForge USB from the boot menu that appears.
  4. Pick an image from the Ventoy menu — it lists every ISO you copied to the drive.

The Ventoy menu

When the PC boots from the drive, Ventoy shows a menu of the images on the drive’s data partition. Select one and it boots as if you’d burned that ISO to its own dedicated drive. Adding or removing systems later is just copying or deleting files — the menu updates itself.

What to expect

  • Booting from USB is generally slower than from the PC’s internal disk — that’s normal.
  • Some firmware needs a one-time menu key tapped repeatedly right after power-on; others need the USB moved up the boot order.
  • Whether a specific ISO boots with Secure Boot on depends on the ISO’s own signing, not on BootForge.

If it doesn’t boot

Don’t worry — most boot problems are a firmware setting. The Troubleshooting guide covers Secure Boot, UEFI vs Legacy, Fast Boot, drives that aren’t detected, boot order, empty menus, and port/hub issues. The same fixes are built into the app under Tools → Troubleshooting.