Rufus is a lightweight tool designed for formatting and creating bootable USB drives, including USB flash drives, memory sticks, and pendrives. Despite its compact size, Rufus is packed with robust features! Notably, it boasts impressive speed; for example, it operates roughly twice as quickly as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, and the Windows 7 USB download tool when generating a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO image (with a mention of WiNToBootic for its comparable speed). Additionally, Rufus shows slightly better performance in creating Linux bootable USBs directly from ISOs. A partial list of compatible ISOs can be found here.This utility is particularly advantageous in scenarios such as:
- Creating USB installation media from bootable ISOs (for Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
- Working on computers without an operating system installed
- Flashing firmware or BIOS from DOS
- Utilizing low-level utilities
Changelog for Rufus 4.6.2208:
- Introduced a new setup.exe wrapper to circumvent Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568)
- Added TimeZone for regional options replication (#2499)
- Configured local account passwords to remain unchanged by default
- Resolved an issue when writing compressed VHD images (#2468)
- Fixed an error when launching Rufus from PowerShell command line (#2556)
- Enhanced the check for revoked UEFI bootloaders to include Linux SBAT, Windows SVN, and cert DBX
- Improved support for boot media in ReactOS (#2589)
Download options: Rufus 4.5 | Portable version 1.4 MB (Open Source)
Download: Rufus 32-bit | ARM64 version
For more information, visit: Rufus Home Page | Project Page on GitHub
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