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.

Changes in 4.15.2396:

• Add RISC-V 64 support to UEFI:NTFS
• Improve the guards for using the “silent” Windows installation option
• Improve the ability to cancel during write retries
• Improve progress reporting for compressed image extraction
• Fix unrestricted XML entity expansion and integer overflow in ezxml parser (courtesy of Eric Sadowski)
• Fix “silent” Windows installation failing at 75% in most cases
• Fix a crash during boot when using UEFI:NTFS on Snapdragon X based ARM64 platforms
• Fix first WUE option always being checked by default
• Fix an infinite loop when using Windows ISOs that contain multiple WIMs
• Fix “Enable runtime UEFI media validation” checkbox not always being properly enabled
• Other WUE improvements/fixes for OneDrive removal and username validation (with thanks to @christian8641)

o Version 4.16 (2026.11.??)
Finally work around the AMI NTFS driver bug, so that runtime UEFI media validation can work on the millions of PCs that AMI screwed up
Finally report USB 3.2+ devices (USB 3.2 = 20 Gbps, USB 4.0 = 40 Gpbs, USB 4.1 = 80 Gbps – See, USB Forum, it’s really NOT that hard!)
Fix the CA 2023 updated files not being taken into account during runtime UEFI media validation
Fix the “Silent” installation option being potentially applied even when all dependencies aren’t met
Fix the a regression where “Write as ESP” used the whole drive, instead of the expected 1 GB partition
Fix WUE timezone duplication for non English locales and reinstate the use of dots in local usernames
Add classic right click context menu restoration to the QoL improvements option (courtesy of Frédéric Lachapelle)
Drop the ever problematic use of Group Policies when disabling the “Do you want to format this drive?” prompt
Improve raw image partition (re)mount (courtesy of Jared Hagel)
Update embedded GRUB to version 2.16
Update libcdio to latest
Update the official DBX URLs, since they were changed by Microsoft
Address multiple vulnerabilities, courtesy of @indep-arg, Andreas Fehlner, Adam Korczynski and Ramesh Adhikari

 

 

(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