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 3.11.1678 changelog:
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Add Rock Ridge deep directory support [#1526]
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Add an option to write small ISOs to an ESP (GPT only)
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Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-SELECT) to extract content from an additional zip archive on top of the ISO
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Add a cheat mode (Alt-G) to disable Virtual Hard Disk listing
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Add a cheat mode (Alt-P) to toggle a GPT ESP to Basic Data (Windows 10 only)
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Fix improper x86 32-bit NTFS driver being used for UEFI:NTFS
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Improve UEFI:NTFS compatibility with older UEFI firmwares [#1213]
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Improve startup time by running the ISO download feature check in the background
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Remove Ubuntu"s splash screen for persistent UEFI drives
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Enable ASLR for the Rufus executable
Download: Rufus 3.11.1678 | Portable | 1.1 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub