Rufus: The Essential Tool for Creating Bootable USB Drives
Rufus is a lightweight yet powerful utility designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives, including USB keys, pen drives, and memory sticks. Despite its compact size, Rufus offers robust functionality and remarkable speed. For example, it operates approximately twice as fast as alternatives like UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, and the Windows 7 USB download tool when crafting a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO file. It deserves a mention for its competitive performance compared to WiNToBootic as well. Even for Linux distributions, Rufus exhibits a slight edge in speed when generating bootable USBs from ISOs.
A comprehensive list of ISOs that Rufus supports can be found here.
Why Choose Rufus?
Rufus is incredibly beneficial in various scenarios, including when you:
- Need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs for Windows, Linux, or UEFI systems.
- Are working on a machine without an operating system installed.
- Want to flash BIOS or any other firmware using DOS.
- Require a platform to run low-level utilities.
What’s New in Rufus 4.10.2279?
The latest version of Rufus, 4.10.2279, comes packed with enhancements and fixes:
- Introduced Dark Mode support (thanks to @ozone10).
- Added capability for creating Windows CA 2023 compatible media (requires a Windows 11 25H2 ISO; see the Rufus FAQ for details).
- Enabled the function of saving an existing drive to ISO (UDF only).
- Enhanced error reporting for VHD/VHDX saving (appreciation to @Kazkans).
- Improved persistence support specifically for Linux Mint.
- Fixed issues related to UEFI DBX updates being inaccurately reported during certain time zones.
- Resolved a problem where selecting a file system in ISO mode could be impossible.
- Corrected crashes that occurred when processing Windows ISOs with excessively long file paths.
Download Rufus
The latest version, Rufus 4.10, can be downloaded from the following links:
- Rufus 4.10 Installer | Portable Version | ~2.0 MB (Open Source)
- Rufus 32-bit | ARM64 Version
Additional Resources
For further information, visit:
For visual guidance, check out the screenshots available here.
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