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 3.9.1624 changelog:
- Add exFAT support when creating blank UEFI:NTFS drives [EXPERIMENTAL]
- Fix ext2/ext3 corruption for partitions larger than 4 GB [#1396]
- Fix early boot files not being usable on compressed NTFS partitions [#1381]
- Fix writing of compressed streams that don"t end on sector boundary [#1422]
- Fix percent not being displayed on slow format
- Improve file preallocation and speed up ISO extraction (courtesy of Mattiwatti) [#1445]
- Improve ext2/ext3 formatting speed
- Improve protective MBR message for GPT partitioned drives
- Improve reporting of Syslinux/GRUB download errors
- Improve reporting of partition types and of Windows" version
- Report the usage of UDF symbolic links [#1446]
- Update embedded Syslinux to 6.04-pre1
Download: Rufus 3.9.1624 | Portable 1.0 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub