Managing files on your drive

Once a drive is prepared, BootForge can read it back so you can see and manage the images on it, without a PC. That’s the Drive tab.

The Drive tab and boot preview

The Drive tab (and the Home drive card) show a boot preview: roughly what you’ll see when you boot a PC from this drive, meaning the list of images Ventoy will offer. Each row shows the file, and where a name matches a catalog entry, its friendly name and category.

If the drive has no images yet, you’ll see a prompt to copy some on. If BootForge can’t read the contents, it says so and the drive is still fine to use.

All of this works on an exFAT drive, the default BootForge prepares. On a drive with a FAT32 data partition, BootForge can’t list or manage the files: the Drive tab says “This drive can’t be managed here”, and from 0.1.31 the boot preview says it lists images on exFAT drives only. The drive itself is fine; add images from a computer or the system file manager. See Data partition filesystem.

You don’t grant Android folder access for any of this. BootForge talks to the drive directly once you allow it to use the USB device. The only action that still opens Android’s folder picker is Open in file manager, which is exactly what a folder grant is for.

Free space

The drive card shows free space (“12 GB free of 57 GB”). Where the drive reports its full capacity, you’ll also get a segmented usage bar (images vs free) like the phone library’s.

Finding things

Open Search, filter and sort for a side sheet with:

• a search box over the image names;
• a Folder filter, defaulting to the whole drive;
• Sort by Name or Size, ascending or descending. (Date isn’t offered here: the drive’s listing carries no timestamp. Your phone library does have it.)

You can also switch the listing between a list and a grid. A count reads “Showing 4 of 21” whenever a search or folder filter is narrowing things down, and Reset clears them.

Two things worth knowing: narrowing the list clears any selection you’d made, and the free-space summary above always describes the whole drive, not the filtered subset.

Checksums and verifying

When BootForge copies an image onto a drive it records that file’s digest in a small sidecar on the drive itself. Rows that have one show Checksum on record, and a row whose file no longer matches shows Changed since written.

On record is not a promise about the medium. It says a digest was recorded at write time, not that the drive still holds those bytes. Tap Verify to actually read the file back and compare, and the result names the moment it was read. Checksum computes the SHA-256 of what the drive held during that read so you can compare it against a source you trust yourself.

Browsing the files

The list above is images. To walk the drive’s folders, open the file browser from the controls row. It has breadcrumbs, folders first, a free text viewer, and a Pro editor. The drive’s EFI partition is browsable there too, read-only. See Browsing files.

Deleting images

• Tap an image and Delete to remove it. The confirmation notes how much space it frees.
• Long-press to select several and delete them at once. Partial failures are handled gracefully.

Deleting an image from the drive frees its space immediately and removes it from the Ventoy boot menu. It can’t be undone.

Adding more

To put more images on, copy them from your library, use Copy images to drive to pick files straight off your phone, or download to the drive (Pro). You never need to re-prepare the drive to add or remove systems.

Ejecting

Eject drive under More actions releases BootForge’s hold on the drive so you can unplug it safely.

Drive details

For the full picture, open Tools → Drive information: capacity, used and free, Ventoy version and the latest available, filesystem, partition scheme, image count, and USB identity.

Partition layout

The Partition layout card is read from the drive’s own MBR or GPT partition table, not inferred from what a Ventoy drive is expected to look like. Every entry gets a row with its number, what its type code says it holds, the code itself (0x07, say, or a GPT type GUID), where it starts and how big it is. It works on any drive BootForge recognises, including ones it didn’t prepare. A drive with no partition table says so, and a table that couldn’t be read gets a different note, so one is never mistaken for the other. Nothing is written.

Diagnostics report

Below it, the Diagnostics report is a local record of what the app did recently, for describing a problem accurately, in feedback for example. Drive names, file paths and identifiers are removed before you see it. Nothing is sent anywhere: Copy report and Share report hand it to you, and where it goes from there is your choice. Read it through before you share it.

To save the whole drive to a file, see Backing up and restoring a drive.