Make a bootable drive
Boot-menu themes
Styling the menu your drive shows at startup — the seven-theme gallery, your own image as a background, and how the preview works.
When you boot a PC from a Ventoy drive, the menu you see is Ventoy’s own plain one. BootForge can write a theme onto the drive so that menu looks like something you chose instead.
This is about the drive’s boot menu, not the app’s colours. For the app’s own palette see Settings.
Where to find it
Open the drive card’s ⋮ menu on Home and pick Boot menu theme. The sheet lists Ventoy default first, then the gallery, then Custom, with the theme currently on the drive marked Current.
Ventoy default is what a freshly prepared drive gets. BootForge never writes a theme unless you pick one, and picking Ventoy default again removes it.
The gallery
Seven themes, each a different layout rather than a recolour of the same one:
| Theme | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| BootForge | The house theme. A lit header band carries the BootForge mark over a technical grid, with the menu panel centred below it. Free. |
| Aubergine | Warm deep-purple poster. A large display headline and raking light bands own the upper half, with a wide, airy menu docked below. |
| Blueprint | Drafting-table blue. A double-ruled frame with corner ticks, a dimensioned drawing area, and a real title block captioning the sheet. |
| Console | A terminal that happens to be a boot menu. Amber phosphor prompt, scanlines, no chrome, and the tightest 22-row list in the gallery. |
| Glacier | Minimal ice-blue with no menu panel at all. The list sits on bare surface between two hairlines. |
| Mint | Fresh dark green on a vertical identity rail. A leaf mark and a rotated wordmark hold the left edge while a denser list runs beside them. |
| Paper | The light one. Warm off-white stock, a serif masthead over a hairline, a narrow measure, and an ink-bar selection. |
BootForge is free. The other six are part of BootForge Pro, which also covers the custom background below.
Your own image as the background
Pick Custom, choose a picture from your phone, and frame it. The boot screen is always 4:3, so the crop frame is fixed; pinch to zoom and drag to move inside it. The image is darkened when it’s applied so the menu text stays readable over it.
The result is your picture behind BootForge’s own menu layout, so what you’re changing is the backdrop, not the whole design. Custom backgrounds are Pro.
The preview
Every entry shows a preview of the menu. It’s simulated: BootForge composes what the menu should look like from the theme’s own files and, for the drive you have connected, the background actually on it. Tap a preview to open it full screen, where you can pinch, double-tap, and drag to look closer.
Previews approximate the result. Exact layout and scaling depend on the PC you boot, since the firmware picks the screen mode. The gallery is authored for 1024×768.
Applying and removing
Apply writes the theme’s files to the drive and points Ventoy’s config at them. Your images aren’t touched, and neither is anything else on the drive; you can change theme as often as you like. Applying takes a moment because the payload is written to the drive and its integrity checked first. If that check fails, nothing is written.
To go back, choose Ventoy default.
If the drive already carries someone else’s theme
If BootForge finds a theme on the drive that it didn’t put there, it says so. Applying a theme from here only re-points the menu at the new one; your own theme files stay where they are.
When it won’t work
- The drive is busy. Wait for the running copy, download or install to finish.
- The drive’s
ventoy.jsoncouldn’t be read. BootForge leaves the file alone rather than rewriting a config it doesn’t understand. - The drive couldn’t be opened. Reconnect it and check it on the Home tab.
In all three cases nothing is written to the drive.