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 3.6 changelog:
- Add support for persistent partitions [EXPERIMENTAL] (Note: The above won"t work with Ubuntu until Ubuntu bug #1489855 is properly fixed)
- Add a mode to use VDS when partitioning/formatting (Alt-V) [EXPERIMENTAL]
- Add full extraction support for efi.img (Solus)
- Fix listing of potentially blocking processes
- Fix NTFS not being selectable when using Grub4DOS
- Fix download script not being launched when the user name contains a space
- Fix translated messages potentially being truncated (e.g. Thai)
- Fix progress bar report for screen readers (Accessibility issue)
- Fix a regression where Windows format prompts would not be suppressed
- Improve(?) Windows To Go support by following Microsoft"s recommended partition order
- Don"t enumerate Windows Sandbox VHDs
- Disable ISO mode when Manjaro ISOHybrids are being used
- Update embedded GRUB to version 2.04
Download: Rufus 3.6 | Portable | 1.0 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub