Images that are fragmented or have gaps on the filesystem can fail to load

[ugjka]

It seems that vtoyboot expects images it loads to be one continuous file without fragmentation or "gaps" on the filesystem or it can fail to boot.

This happened to me after my Ventoy partition started to run out of free space and I was moving on and off new images without giving it much thought. Which, without me realizing, resulted in fragmented files.

The first problem that happened was that I couldn't boot my images with secure boot on. I brushed it off and thought there was something wrong with the OS i was using, but i couldn't find anything about it online. Then, after i shuffled my files even more, my images started to fail even on Legacy Bios mode and gave me the error message "device mapper: linear: Gap in table" or something to that effect. Now that gave me the clue that Vtoyboot probably expects continuous files.

I verified that this is the problem by moving all my files off the Ventoy partition and wiping it clean. Then I copied all my files back in one go, which should force all files to be continuous on the file system. Now I could boot all my images in all modes be it secure boot or legacy bios or everything in between.

If you are on Windows you could probably use some file defragmenter app. But there are no exfat defragmenters for linux which is a shame.