Rufus is a lightweight, free, and open-source utility designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives. It is renowned for being significantly faster than many similar tools. With support for USB keys, pen drives, and memory sticks, all Rufus versions make creating bootable USB drives from any ISO image simple.
Use Rufus, especially for cases to:
- Create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.).
- Operate on a system without an installed operating system.
- Run a low-level utility.
- Update BIOS or firmware using a DOS environment.
Generating an ISO image from a physical CD/DVD or a collection of files is straightforward with readily available CD burning applications, such as the free options CDBurnerXP and ImgBurn.
Rufus Portable is a USB formatting utility that can also create a bootable USB drive using a bootable ISO image. This app requires admin rights. Despite its small size, Rufus provides every part you want!
Rufus is quick. On occasion, it’s about twice as quick as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, or the Windows 7 USB download tool when creating a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO. It can be marginally sooner when creating Linux bootable USBs from ISOs.
Rufus supports a variety of bootable ISO files, including various Linux distributions and Windows installation .iso files, as well as raw disk image files (including compressed ones). If needed, it will install a bootloader such as SYSLINUX or GRUB onto the flash drive to render it bootable. It also allows the installation of MS-DOS or FreeDOS onto a flash drive, as well as the creation of Windows To Go bootable media. It supports formatting flash drives using FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, UDF, and ReFS filesystems.
Supported Languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, and Czech. Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, and Hungarian. Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, and Persian. Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Latin). Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
Changes in Rufus Version 4.11 :
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 8 and later, both 32-bit and 64-bit.
