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 4.2.4070 Beta changelog:
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Add detection and warning for UEFI revoked bootloaders (including ones revoked through SkuSiPolicy.p7b)
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Add ZIP64 support, to extract .zip images that are larger than 4 GB
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Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed VHDX image
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Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed FFU (Full Flash Update) image [EXPERIMENTAL]
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Fix a crash when trying to open Windows ISOs, with the x86 32-bit version
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Increase ISO → ESP limit, for Debian 12 netinst images
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Make sure the main partition size is aligned to the cluster size
Download: Rufus 4.2.4070 Beta | 1.3 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub