Home / About Thomas Sonnabend

About

About Thomas Sonnabend

I am Thomas Sonnabend. I write this site on my own, from Estero, FL 33928, and everything published here carries my name and my contact details.

Why I write this

I kept solving the same problems over and over: a stick that will not appear in the boot menu, an install image that refuses to copy because of a file size limit, a machine that boots the drive in the wrong firmware mode and causes trouble weeks later. Every time, the answer existed somewhere — buried in a forum thread from 2016, or in a specification nobody reads for fun.

So I started writing the answers down properly: the procedure, why it works, and what to check when it does not. That is this site. It is the reference I wanted when I started, written for the person standing in front of a machine that will not cooperate.

How the guides are made

Every procedure here has been run on real hardware or in a virtual machine before it was published. Screens and error messages are recorded as they appear, not paraphrased from memory. Where behaviour depends on the vendor or the firmware version, I say so instead of pretending one machine speaks for all of them. The full method is in the editorial policy.

What this site does not do

• No downloads. I do not host, mirror or repackage anyone's software. Every tool is linked to the website of the project that develops it, so you always get the current release with the checksums its developers published.
• No affiliation. Ventoy, Rufus, balenaEtcher, WoeUSB, Microsoft and every other name mentioned belong to their respective owners. Nothing here is endorsed by them and I do not speak for them.
• No support desk for other people's code. If a tool has a bug, it belongs in that project's issue tracker, where the people who can fix it will see it.

How the site is funded

Hosting and my time are paid for by advertising displayed on the pages. Advertising buys space and nothing else: no tool gets covered because someone paid, no comparison is arranged to favour an advertiser, and I do not publish sponsored articles or paid links. If a commercial relationship ever exists with something I write about, it will be disclosed at the top of that article.

Corrections

Firmware changes, tools change, and something here is probably out of date right now. If you find an error, write to me — corrections are made in the page itself and the update date is changed. I do not quietly delete pages that turned out to be wrong.