Download Rufus 4.8.2253: USB Formatting Tool

Discover Rufus: A Powerful Tool for Creating Bootable USB Drives

Rufus is a lightweight yet robust application designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives, including USB keys, memory sticks, and more. Notably, it outperforms many competitors in speed, making it an optimal choice for users needing to create installation media. For example, Rufus can create a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO at speeds nearly double that of popular alternatives like UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, and the Windows 7 USB Download Tool. Additionally, it demonstrates faster performance when making Linux bootable USBs from ISOs. A selection of compatible ISOs can be found here.

Use Cases for Rufus

Rufus is especially beneficial in various scenarios, such as:

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

Latest Updates: Rufus 4.8.2253

The latest version of Rufus brings significant enhancements and fixes, including:

Image Processing Improvement

Transition to wimlib for efficient WIM image processing:
Accelerated image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
Enhanced Windows To Go drive creation (performance may vary based on drive quality)
Potential compatibility improvements with Parallels on Mac, despite still being unsupported
Ability to split files larger than 4GB using Alt-E (though not as fast as utilizing UEFI:NTFS)

Additional Modifications and Fixes

Implemented Visual Studio binaries to overcome limitations associated with MinGW DLL delays
Added exceptions for Linux ISOs that mandate DD mode (such as Nobara and openSUSE)
Improved logging capabilities for UEFI bootloaders, including Secure Boot status
Resolved issues related to size limitations when restoring uncompressed VHDs to the original drive
Fixed crashes occurring when accessing the log with the 32-bit MinGW version
Corrected command line parameters not being properly forwarded to the original Windows setup.exe