Rufus
Easily format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.
- Free • Open Source
- Bootable USB Creator
- Windows
- PortableApps.com
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What is Rufus?
Rufus is a utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc.
Features:
- Formats USB memory sticks to FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT/UDF/ReFS
- Creates bootable USB drive from a wide range of ISOs
- Creates MS-DOS/FreeDOS bootable USB memory sticks, with no external files required
- Creates BIOS or UEFI bootable drives
- Checks for bad blocks
- Modern UI, with UAC elevation for Windows Vista and later
- Fully Open Source (GPL v3)
It can be be especially useful for cases where:
- you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
- you need to install an Operating System or run a Live CD from USB
- you need to work on a system that doesn't have an OS installed
- you want to run a DOS low-level utility
Despite its small size, Rufus provides you with everything you need!
Features:
- Formats USB memory sticks to FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT/UDF/ReFS
- Creates bootable USB drive from a wide range of ISOs
- Creates MS-DOS/FreeDOS bootable USB memory sticks, with no external files required
- Creates BIOS or UEFI bootable drives
- Checks for bad blocks
- Modern UI, with UAC elevation for Windows Vista and later
- Fully Open Source (GPL v3)
It can be be especially useful for cases where:
- you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
- you need to install an Operating System or run a Live CD from USB
- you need to work on a system that doesn't have an OS installed
- you want to run a DOS low-level utility
Despite its small size, Rufus provides you with everything you need!
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Categories
OS & Utilities • CD/DVD ToolsPlatform details
Windows: Windows 7 or later.
Tags
- usb-boot
- efi
- flash
- bios
- fat
- bootable-iso
- detect-image-format
- exfat
- refs
- usb-formatting
- iso
- freedos
- dos
- ntfs
- fat32
Lists containing Rufus
Free tools (Software that can help you mostly in any field) • Open/Free soft must have • My Setup - All Apps and Software • SoftwaresRufus
Summary
Our users have written 60 comments and reviews about Rufus, and it has gotten 1242 likes
- Developed by Akeo Consulting
- Open Source and Free product.
- Average rating of 4.4
- 58 alternatives listed
Popular alternatives
View allTop Rufus apps, plugins, extensions and add-ons
View allRufus was added to AlternativeTo by WhiteTiger on Jan 16, 2012 and this page was last updated Nov 12, 2021.
From Linux to Windows, it creates working bootable drives.
Pros:
Cons:
Very useful software, easy to use too.
is good for everything whatever OS u want to boot on USB...
Great Software !
Rufus is my go-to tool nowadays when it comes to creating a boot-usb thumb drive. It is simple to use and the created boot-usb works on 99% of the machines I use it on, since it does not use a grub2 boot, so even older and outdated hardware will not have a problem. If you want to just make either a Win PE/Linux Live System or a thumb drive to install an OS from, just get Rufus and be done with.
Now, two sidenotes, that do not really have to do with the main functionality of Rufus.
The first one is somewhat negative. Before many years I remember I tried to make a bootable USB and Rufus actually killed my USB. Now, I am not sure if it was a bug or actually just bad timing that ended up pinning the "crime" on Rufus, but because of that I was avoiding Rufus for quite a long time, worried it would ruin another one of my USBs. Nowadays I do not really blame Rufus for it, as it could have been anything.
Now the second one is overly positive and actually it is the exact opposite of the above and this happened to me recently, like within this month. Easy2Boot actually glitched out while creating a USB thumbdrive and it made it so Windows would not recognize it, even though Linux had no problem seeing and using it. To be more precise, Windows would actually see the USB and it's partition, but could not assign a letter to it and would constantly ask me to format it, without it really changing anything. I used from Diskpart to Minitool Partition Magic and GParted or whatnot. Nothing absolutely worked. Even tried to change it from MBR to GPT and in general I was trying anything off of my head that could somehow revive it. **And then I saw that even if other programs would not see the USB, Rufus actually could see the thumb drive. ** I then chose to create a FreeDOS thumbdrive with Rufus and voila, it fixed whatever Easy2Boot ruined! XD Amusingly enough, because I tried out Easy2Boot more, this happened twice more, but thankfully Rufus fixed it no problem =D
Extremely lightweight and useful for Windows. The best way to create bootable USB flash drives!