Ventoy 1.1.18 Adds SteamOS Recovery Support and Linux Remount Fixes
Ventoy, the free open-source utility that turns a plain USB stick into a multi-boot drive, has shipped version 1.1.18. It went live today, and while most of the changes are the sort you only notice when something is broken, this build carries one feature that a lot of Steam Deck owners have wanted for years.
The tool is the one you reach for instead of Rufus or Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. Rather than wiping a drive down to a single ISO, Ventoy carves out a small bootable partition and leaves the rest as ordinary storage. Drop ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD(x), or EFI files onto it, and a startup menu picks what to boot.
The Remount Fix Is the Real Reason to Upgrade
The headline change is a refinement of Ventoy's Linux remount feature. Boot a live Linux distro from a Ventoy drive and the partition holding your ISOs can actually be useful. You might want to grab a package straight off the image, or hand the disk to something like CloneZilla.
Historically this tripped people up. Many desktop distros threw a "device busy" error the instant you tried to mount that partition. This version targets the problem on mainstream desktop distros, so the ISO partition comes straight up from the file-manager sidebar without a single command.
Keep in mind that Ventoy now assigns the partition a stable name, /dev/mapper/VentoyPart. It used to shift between boots, which quietly broke scripts and left anyone used to a predictable path second-guessing themselves.
The tested list is long. Fedora 44 and 45, Ubuntu 22.04 through 26.10, Debian Live 13.5 and 13.6, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin, and MX Linux all show up. For distros still outside that sweet spot, there are fallback steps using udevadm and dmsetup, if you're comfortable in a terminal.
The SteamOS support is experimental, and that's honest labeling. It answers years-old community requests going back to issues like #1815, trying to get Valve's recovery media bootable through Ventoy. Genuinely handy if your Steam Deck ever needs a reinstall or repair.
It Fits the Usual Ventoy Pattern
Ventoy releases often, sometimes a few times a year, chasing new distro drops and patching regressions from upstream kernel changes. This one is a maturity update, not a rewrite.
The recent timeline reads the same way. Version 1.1.17 in July leaned on Secure Boot process work plus support for UOS, EulerOS, and Athena OS. The 1.1.14 through 1.1.16 series mostly dealt with the "UEFI CA 2023" secure boot verification problem, 1.1.13 had to be quietly retired after a mistake, and 1.1.15 patched the follow-up firmware bug.
Alongside the remount work, this build suppresses duplicate disk icons in the Linux file-manager sidebar, makes the partition directly readable by CloneZilla, fixes a Fedora 45 beta boot issue, and patches a Windows/WinPE secure boot check failure. Ubuntu persistence over a live session also gets fixed, as does booting for Grml 2026.09. There's support for custom Syslinux-based ISOs and better handling of the latest LinuxConsole release too.
Ventoy sits inside a small ecosystem. iVentoy turns machines into PXE/HTTPBoot servers, and VentoyPlugson is the GUI configurator for persistence, themes, and password protection.
Head here to download the release.
