Rufus

Rufus Overview

Rufus is a small utility that helps you format and create bootable USB flash drives (USB keys, memory cards, etc.). Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need to create a USB installation media with bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.) or firmware from DOS.

Rufus Features:

Peculiarities:
Rufus is a small utility that helps you format and create bootable USB flash drives faster than analogues. The home page shows test results according to which Rufus spends almost three times less time uploading to the “whistle” of the Slackware distribution than the well-known UNetbootin.
The user can, if desired, align the partitions on the flash drive (the Add Fixes for Old BIOSes item, which is hidden in the Format Options drop-down menu). If your machine is very old and does not detect a bootable USB drive, try activating this option – it may help.

Possibilities:
Checking the flash drive for bad blocks (writing data in several passes, from 1 to 4, default – 2).
As for creating “boot” media, the following options are possible: MS-DOS / FreeDOS (built into the utility itself) or SysLinux (a set of “penguin” kernel loaders).
Burning Bootable ISO Images
Keeping logs, which can also be useful in particularly serious cases.
The version is portable and works without installation on a computer.

DOS support notes:
If you create a bootable DOS disk and use a non-US keyboard layout, Rufus will try to select a keyboard layout based on your system locale. In this case, it is recommended to choose FreeDOS (it is the default), since it supports more keyboard layouts than MS-DOS.

Notes on UEFI/GPT support:
As of version 1.3.2, Rufus supports UEFI/GPT installation media, which means it will allow you to install Windows 7, Windows 8 or Linux in full UEFI/GPT mode. However, Windows Vista and later versions of Windows require full UEFI/GPT support. Due to an OS limitation, Windows XP limits the creation of bootable disks in UEFI/MBR mode.

Rufus is useful when:
You need to create a USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.)
You need to work on a system that does not have an OS installed
You need flash BIOS or other firmware from DOS
You want to run low-level utilities.

List of ISOs that Rufus works with:
Arch Linux, Archbang, BartPE/pebuilder, CentOS, Damn Small Linux, Fedora, FreeDOS, Gentoo, gNewSense, Hiren’s Boot CD, LiveXP, Knoppix, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, NT Password Registry Editor, OpenSUSE, Parted Magic, Slackware, Tails, Trinity Rescue Kit, Ubuntu, Ultimate Boot CD, Windows XP (SP2 or later), Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10.

System Requirements

Windows 8, 10, 11 (x86/x64)

File Information:

Program version: 4.6 (Build 2208)
Official website: Pete Batard
Interface language: English, others
Treatment: not required