Introducing Rufus: A Powerful USB Formatting Tool
Rufus is an innovative, lightweight utility designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives, including USB keys, pendrives, and memory sticks. Despite its small footprint, this tool packs impressive capabilities and operates at remarkable speeds. For example, when creating a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO, Rufus performs nearly twice as fast as competitors like UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, and the Windows 7 USB Download Tool, with WiNToBootic being a close contender. Additionally, Rufus demonstrates superior efficiency in generating Linux bootable USBs from ISOs.
When to Utilize Rufus
This utility proves invaluable in several scenarios, including but not limited to:
- Generating USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
- Operating on a system lacking an installed operating system
- Flashing BIOS or other firmware directly from DOS
- Running low-level utilities for specific tasks
Rufus 4.7.2231: Notable Updates
The latest version, Rufus 4.7.2231, introduces several enhancements and fixes:
- Implemented a feature to detect and download updated DBXs from the official UEFI repository.
- Added ztsd compression support for disk images.
- Introduced an exclusion feature in settings to ignore disks with specific GPT GUIDs.
- Enhanced detection for compressed VHD images that exceed target drive capacity.
- Resolved issues with the command-line process not being deleted when running Rufus from different directories.
- Fixed potential truncation of FAT filenames from embedded images during extraction.
- Addressed a side-loading vulnerability (CVE-2025-26624) related to cfgmgr32.dll, with contributions from @EmperialX.
- Eliminated UI memory leaks, thanks to input from @ozone10.
- Configured error descriptions to fall back to user/system defaults.
- Prevented the command-line process from running on POSIX shells.
- Discontinued support for ARM 32-bit builds; however, ARM 64-bit builds remain unaffected.
- Updated FreeDOS and Grub4DOS to their latest versions.
Download Options
You can download Rufus 4.7 using the links below:
- Rufus 4.7
- Portable Version (1.6 MB, Open Source)
- 32-bit Version
- ARM64 Version
For more information, visit the Rufus Home Page or check out the Project Page on GitHub.
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