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 4.5.2180 changelog:
- Add new advanced option to perform runtime UEFI media validation of suitable images (Windows, most Linux)
- Move the Use Rufus MBR advanced option to a cheat mode (Alt-A)
- Fix truncation of VHDX images, as well as a benign error message when writing VHD/VHDX (#2468)
- Fix support for Linux persistence in some configurations (Mint, Ubuntu 24.04)
- Fix multiple potential vulnerabilities (with thanks to Mansour Gashasbi)
- Update internal GRUB to version 2.12
- Update UEFI:NTFS to latest (now always uses the ntfs-3g driver, rather than the buggy AMI NTFS one)
- Increase buffer size when copying ISO files, in an attempt to minimize the AMI NTFS UEFI driver bug
- Improve partition creation handling
- Don"t display the WUE dialog when a conflicting unattend.xml already exists (#2451)
Download: Rufus 4.5 | Portable 1.4 MB (Open Source)
Download: Rufus 32-bit | ARM64
Links: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub