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 3.22.2009 changelog:
- Add SHA-1 and SHA-256 x86 acceleration on CPUs that support it (#2090, courtesy of Jeffrey Walton)
- Add an option to disable BitLocker device encryption in the Windows User Experience dialog
- Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-P) to preserve the log between sessions
- Fix potential media creation errors by forcing the unmount of stale .wim images
- Fix potential access errors in ISO → ESP mode by forcing Large FAT32 formatting
- Fix user-specified label not being preserved on error/cancel
- Fix some large SSD devices being listed by default
- Fix processing of Rock Ridge CE fields
- Work around the use of Rock Ridge symbolic links for Linux firmware packages (Debian)
- Remove the ISO download feature on Windows 7
- Note: This is the last version of Rufus that can run on Windows 7
Download: Rufus 3.22 | 1.35 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub