Rufus (software)

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Rufus is a free and open-source portable application for Microsoft Windows that can be used to format and create bootable USB flash drives or Live USBs. It is developed by Pete Batard of Akeo Consulting.

Video Rufus (software)

History

Rufus was originally designed as a modern Open Source replacement for the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Windows, which was primarily used to create DOS bootable USB flash drives.

The first official release of Rufus, version 1.0.3 (earlier versions were internal/alpha only), was released on December 11, 2011, with originally only MS-DOS support. Version 1.0.4 introduced FreeDOS support and version 1.1.0 introduced ISO image support. Until 1.2.0, two separate versions were provided, with one for MS-DOS and one for FreeDOS. UEFI boot support was introduced with version 1.3.2, localization with 1.4.0 and Windows To Go with 2.0.

Maps Rufus (software)

Features

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 as FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, UDF or ReFS filesystems.

Rufus can also be used to compute the MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashes of the currently selected image.