Rufus: A High-Performance Utility for Bootable USB Drives
Rufus stands out as a compact yet powerful utility specifically designed for formatting and creating bootable USB flash drives, commonly known as USB keys, pendrives, or memory sticks. Despite its small footprint, Rufus is packed with features that cater to various bootable ISO formats, and it excels in performance, often outperforming other leading utilities.
Why Choose Rufus?
If you’re looking for speed and efficiency, Rufus is a stellar choice. For example, it can create a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO file roughly twice as fast as alternatives like UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, or the Windows 7 USB download tool, earning praise for its rapid operation. Additionally, Rufus is also slightly faster when it comes to creating Linux bootable USBs from ISOs. A comprehensive list of supported ISOs can be found here.
Rufus is Particularly Useful For:
- Generating USB installation media from various bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
- Utilizing systems lacking an operating system
- Flashing BIOS or other firmware directly from DOS
- Running low-level utilities efficiently
Latest Updates: Rufus 4.8.2253
Key Features and Changes:
- Transition to wimlib for all WIM image processing, significantly enhancing the speed of image analysis when opening Windows ISOs.
- Improved speed for creating Windows To Go drives (though performance may vary based on drive quality).
- Enhanced functionality that addresses limitations with Parallels on Mac systems (though some aspects remain unsupported).
- New capability to split files larger than 4GB using Alt-E (although it’s still slower compared to UEFI:NTFS).
Additional Improvements:
- Full adoption of Visual Studio binaries due to issues with MinGW DLL delay-loading.
- More exceptions for specific Linux ISOs that operate solely in DD mode (noteworthy examples include Nobara and openSUSE).
- Enhanced logging for UEFI bootloaders, including Secure Boot status.
- Resolved a size limitation problem when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same USB drive.
- Fixed a crash issue related to log access in the 32-bit MinGW version.
- Addressed command-line parameter forwarding to the original Windows setup.exe.
Rufus 4.9.2256 Fixes
- Addressed issues with downloads from rufus.ie impacted by recent changes to GitHub servers.
- Resolved a problem with unofficial Windows ISOs, ensuring that single index WIMs now correctly present the WUE dialog.
Download Options
You can easily download the latest version of Rufus:
- Rufus 4.9 | Portable version | ~2.0 MB (Open Source)
- Rufus 32-bit | ARM64 version
Resources
To learn more or access the project page, visit the following links:
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