Download Rufus 4.10.2278 Beta Version

Rufus: The Essential Tool for Creating Bootable USB Drives

Rufus is a powerful yet compact utility designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives, including USB memory sticks and pendrives. This free tool stands out for its speed, often outperforming popular alternatives such as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, or the Windows 7 USB Download Tool. For example, Rufus can create a Windows 7 installation USB from an ISO file roughly twice as fast as its competitors. It also provides superior performance when preparing bootable USBs for Linux operating systems. You can find a comprehensive list of supported ISOs here.

One of Rufus’s key features is its ability to download official Windows 11 ISOs directly or work with existing image files. It prepares USB drives that are compatible with both UEFI and legacy BIOS systems. Furthermore, Rufus offers advanced functionalities that allow users to bypass certain Windows 11 installation requirements, such as TPM, Secure Boot, and RAM limitations, which facilitates installation on older hardware. Additionally, it supports Windows To Go, enabling a full Windows 11 environment to run directly from a USB drive.

When to Use Rufus:

Creating USB installation media from various bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
Working on systems without an installed operating system
Flashing a BIOS or firmware directly from DOS
Running low-level utilities

Key Features of Rufus:

Formats USB drives, flash cards, and virtual drives to a variety of file systems including FAT, NTFS, exFAT, and more
Creates bootable USB drives using FreeDOS or MS-DOS
Generates BIOS or UEFI bootable drives, including support for UEFI bootable NTFS
Facilitates bootable drive creation from ISOs and disk images
Allows creation of Windows 11 installation drives bypassing TPM and Secure Boot requirements
Enables the creation of Windows To Go drives
Creates images of existing drives in formats like VHD, VHDX, and FFU
Supports persistent Linux partitions
Computes checksums (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512) for selected images
Includes runtime validation for UEFI bootable media
Enhances Windows installation with automatic OOBE settings
Performs bad block checks and detects counterfeit flash drives
Allows downloading official Microsoft retail ISOs for Windows 8, 10, and 11
Supports downloading UEFI Shell ISOs
Features a user-friendly interface available in 38 languages
Offers a portable solution with no installation needed, ensuring compatibility with Secure Boot
100% free under the GPL v3 license

What’s New in Rufus 4.10.2278 Beta:

Introduced Dark Mode support, enhancing user experience (thanks to @ozone10).
Added functionality for creating Windows CA 2023-compatible media (requires Windows 11 25H2 ISO).
Implemented an option to save an existing drive to ISO format (UDF only).
Improved error reporting while saving to VHD/VHDX (appreciation to @Kazkans).
Corrected UEFI DBX update notifications that appeared inaccurately in certain time zones.
Resolved an issue where no file system could be selected in ISO mode.
Fixed crashes related to processing Windows ISOs with extremely long paths.

Download Details:

You can download the latest version of Rufus, Rufus 4.10 Beta, which is just 1.9 MB in size and open source.

For more information, visit the Rufus Home Page or check out the project page on GitHub.