Rufus

About Rufus

Rufus is a single executable of about a megabyte and a half that does one job better than anything larger. Point it at an image, pick the target stick, press start, and it writes a bootable drive in a few minutes. There is no installation, no background service and no bundled extra, and the whole thing runs from wherever it was downloaded to.

What it exposes matters. The partition scheme and target system are chosen explicitly rather than guessed, so a stick can be written for UEFI, for legacy BIOS, or for both, and the file system and cluster size are selectable for the cases where the default is wrong. On a machine that refuses to boot from a stick another tool produced, this is usually the fix.

For desktop images it goes further and offers a set of setup options at write time: removing the hardware requirement checks, skipping the online account requirement, carrying over regional settings and disabling data collection. These are applied to the written media rather than to the running system, so the choices take effect during installation itself.

It also writes non desktop images, which is where it quietly earns its place in a toolkit. Live environments, recovery tools, firmware update images and low level utilities all write correctly, and the bad block check can be run over a suspect stick before trusting an installation to it.

What is included in this build

• Single portable executable with no installation and nothing left behind
• Explicit partition scheme and target system selection for UEFI, legacy or both
• File system and cluster size selection for awkward targets
• Setup options applied to written desktop media including requirement and account bypasses
• Writes live environments, recovery tools and firmware update images correctly
• Bad block checking over the target stick before writing
• Very fast write speeds compared with larger imaging tools
• Multilingual interface with no bundled extras or background components

Changed in version 4.15.2396

• Updated setup option set for current desktop images
• Improved write speed on high capacity USB drives
• Better detection of drives that report incorrect capacity
• Fixed a rare failure when writing images with unusual boot records
• Additional interface language corrections

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Extract the archive. There is nothing to install, the executable runs directly.
2. Back up the USB stick first, since writing erases it completely.
3. Run the executable as administrator so it can access the raw device.
4. Select the image, then set the partition scheme to match the target machine firmware.
5. Leave the stick connected until the completion message appears, then eject it properly.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title