Rufus is a utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.

It can be be especially useful for cases where: you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.). You need to work on a system that doesn’t have an OS installed. You need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS. You want to run a low-level utility.

Rufus is significantly faster than similar utilities and it’s open source and free. All versions of Rufus allow the creation of a bootable USB from an ISO image.

Creating an ISO image from a physical disc or from a set of files is very easy to do however, through the use of a CD burning application For example, such as the freely available CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn.

Rufus Portable is a USB formatting utility which also can create a bootable USB drive using a bootable ISO image. This app requires admin rights. Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need!

Rufus is fast. For instance it’s about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer. Or Windows 7 USB download tool, on the creation of a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO. It is also marginally faster on the creation of Linux bootable USB from ISOs.

Rufus support UEFI as well as GPT for installation media, meaning that it will allow you to install Windows 7, Windows 8 or Linux in full EFI mode.
However, Windows Vista or later is required for full UEFI/GPT support. Because of OS limitations, Windows XP restricts the creation of UEFI bootable drives to MBR mode.

Supported Languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech. Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian. Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian. Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Latin). Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

System Requirements: Windows XP or later, 32 or 64 bit doesn’t matter.

Version 4.14 (2026.04.30)

Windows User Experience improvements:
Add a Quality of Life option, to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft forced nuisances
Add a Silent installation option, that automatically, and WITHOUT PROMPT, installs Windows on the first detected disk
Add an option to copy SkuSiPolicy.p7b to the ESP on installation (please refer to KB5042562 for more info)
Add tooltips for all the dialog options
Add limited support for El-Torito UEFI image extraction (Mostly for Dell BIOS update ISOs)
Improve error report when the user tries to use an image that resides on the target drive
Improve the UEFI:NTFS partition label to make the install media more explicit during Windows Setup disk partitioning
Improve support for Bazzite and other Fedora derivatives that don’t follow EFI conventions
Improve detection and exclusion of the new Bitdefender hidden VHDs
Improve reporting of GRUB and Isolinux MBRs
Fix potential errors during creation of Windows To Go media, due to the use of new versions of bcdboot
Fix errors with local accounts that start or end with whitespaces

(Freeware) x86

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Windows ARM64

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Portable

Version 3.22 (2023.03.25) x86
Add SHA-1 and SHA-256 x86 acceleration on CPUs that support it (courtesy of Jeffrey Walton)
Add an option to disable BitLocker device encryption in the Windows User Experience dialog
Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-P) to preserve the log between sessions
Fix potential media creation errors by forcing the unmount of stale WIM images
Fix potential access errors in ISO → ESP mode by forcing Large FAT32 formatting
Fix user-specified label not being preserved on error/cancel
Fix some large SSD devices being listed by default
Fix processing of Rock Ridge CE fields
Work around the use of Rock Ridge symbolic links for Linux firmware packages (Debian)
Remove the ISO download feature on Windows 7

Note: This is the last version of Rufus that can run on Windows 7

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Portable