Rufus: The Reliable USB Formatting Utility

Features

• Format USB, flash card and virtual drives to FAT/FAT32/NTFS/UDF/exFAT/ReFS/ext2/ext3
• Create DOS bootable USB drives, using FreeDOS or MS-DOS (Windows 8.1 or earlier)
• Create BIOS or UEFI bootable drives, including UEFI bootable NTFS
• Create bootable drives from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, etc.)
• Create bootable drives from bootable disk images, including compressed ones
• Create Windows To Go drives
• Create persistent Linux partitions
• Download official Microsoft Windows 8 or Windows 10 retail ISOs
• Compute MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 checksums of the selected image
• Twice as fast as Microsoft's USB/DVD tool or UNetbootin, on ISO -> USB creation ⁽¹⁾
• Perform bad blocks checks, including detection of "fake" flash drives
• Modern and familiar UI, with 38 languages natively supported
• Small footprint. No installation required.
• Portable
• 100% Free Software (GPL v3)

Compilation

Use either Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.8 or later with SDK 10.0.17134 installed) or MinGW and then invoke the .sln or configure/make respectively.

Visual Studio

Note that, since Rufus is an OSI compliant Open Source project, you are entitled to download and use the freely available Visual Studio Community Edition to build, run or develop for Rufus. As per the Visual Studio Community Edition license this applies regardless of whether you are an individual or a corporate user.

Additional information

Rufus provides extensive information about what it is doing, either through its easily accessible log, or through the Windows debug facility.

• Official Website
• FAQ

Enhancements/Bugs

Please use the GitHub issue tracker for reporting problems or suggesting new features.

⁽¹⁾ Tests carried out with a 16 GB USB 3.0 ADATA pen drive on a Core 2 duo/4 GB RAM platform running Windows 7 x64. ISO: en_windows_7_ultimate_with_sp1_x64_dvd_618240.iso

Name of tool	Version	Time
Windows USB/DVD Download Tool	v1.0.30	8 mins 10s
UNetbootin	v1.1.1.1	6 mins 20s
Rufus	v1.1.0	3 mins 25s