Rufus is a small utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc. Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need! Oh, and Rufus is fast. For instance it"s about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer or Windows 7 USB download tool, on the creation of a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO (with honorable mention to WiNToBootic for managing to keep up). It is also marginally faster on the creation of Linux bootable USBs from ISOs. A non-exhaustive list of Rufus supported ISOs is available here.
It can be especially useful for cases where:
- you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
- you need to work on a system that doesn"t have an OS installed
- you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
- you want to run a low-level utility
Rufus 2.18.1213 changelog:
- Ensure that the same drive is reselected on device refresh
- Add a cheat mode to cycle the USB port of currently selected device
- Make lookup for updatable .cfg file more generic (e.g. ESET SysRescue)
- Fix handling of multiextent ISOs (e.g. BlackArch Linux)
- Fix propagation of image decompression errors
- Update grub4dos to latest
Note: Rufus 2.18 is the last release to support Windows XP and Windows Vista. Future releases will no longer be compatible with these platforms.
Download: Rufus 2.18.1213 | 944 KB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page