Rufus is a small utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives. Oh, and Rufus is fast.
It can be especially useful for cases where:

  • You need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, 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

Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need.

Non-exhaustive list of ISOs Rufus is known to work with:

AlmaLinux, Arch Linux, Archboot, CentOS, Clonezilla, Damn Small Linux, Debian, Elementary OS, Fedora, FreeDOS, Garuda Linux, Gentoo, GParted, Hiren's Boot CD, Kali Linux, Knoppix, KolibriOS, Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux, NT Password Registry Editor, OpenSUSE, Raspberry Pi OS, Raspbian, ReactOS, Red Hat, rEFInd, Rocky Linux, Slackware, Super Grub2 Disk, Tails, Trinity Rescue Kit, TrueNAS CORE, Ubuntu, UEFI Shell, Ultimate Boot CD, Windows XP (SP2+), Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, Windows 11.

What's New

  • Switch to wimlib for all WIM image processing:
    • Greatly speeds up image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
    • Can speed up Windows To Go drive creation (But won't do miracles if you have a crap drive)
    • Might help with Parallels limitations on Mac (But Rufus on Parallels is still unsupported)
    • Enables the splitting of >4GB files with Alt-E (But still WAY SLOWER than using UEFI:NTFS)
  • Switch to using Visual Studio binaries everywhere, due to MinGW DLL delay-loading limitations
  • Add more exceptions for Linux ISOs that restrict themselves to DD mode (Nobara, openSUSE, ...)
  • Improve reporting of UEFI bootloaders in the log, with info on the Secure Boot status
  • Fix an issue with size limitations when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same drive
  • Fix a crash when opening the log with the 32-bit MinGW compiled version
  • Fix commandline parameters not being forwarded to original Windows setup.exe

Rufus 4.7 Changelog

  • Add a mechanism to detect and download updated DBXs from the official UEFI repository
  • Add ztsd compression support for disk images
  • Add a new exclusion feature in the settings, to ignore disks with a specific GPT GUID
  • Improve detection for compressed VHD images that are too large to fit the target drive
  • Fix commandline hogger not being deleted when running Rufus from a different directory
  • Fix FAT filenames from embedded images being potentially truncated on image extraction
  • Fix a side-loading vulnerability [CVE-2025-26624] with cfgmgr32.dll (with thanks to @EmperialX)
  • Fix UI memory leaks (courtesy of @ozone10)
  • Fall back to user/system default locale when getting error description (courtesy of @Wack0)
  • Don't run the commandline hogger on POSIX shells
  • Drop ARM 32-bit builds (Note that ARM 64-bit builds are NOT affected by this)
  • Update FreeDOS and Grub4DOS to latest

Rufus 4.6 Changelog

  • Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions
  • Add TimeZone to regional options replication
  • Set local account passwords to not expire by default
  • Fix an error when trying to write compressed VHD images
  • Fix an error when invoking Rufus from the PowerShell commandline
  • Improve revoked UEFI bootloaders check to support Linux SBAT, Windows SVN and cert DBX
  • Improve support for ReactOS boot media

Rufus 4.4 release notes:

  • Add workaround for distros that use broken symbolic links as their UEFI bootloaders (such as Mint 21.3)
  • Add support for GRUB 2.12
  • Fix a crash when saving .ffu images
  • Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being added, in MBR mode, for some Linux ISOs
  • Prevent Microsoft Dev Drives from being listed
  • Improve support for SDXC card readers
  • Improve Large FAT32 formatting by aligning start of data regions to 1 MB (courtesy of Fred)

Rufus 4.3 release notes:

  • Add support for Rock Ridge symbolic links preservation when NTFS is used
  • Add an exception to enforce NTFS for Linux Mint's LMDE
  • Add an expert feature to restrict a Windows installation to S Mode
  • Fix persistence support for Debian 12 when booted in BIOS mode
  • Fix a regression that prevented the opening of .vhd images
  • Update UEFI:NTFS to report a more explicit error on bootmgr security issues
  • Improve the search for conflicting processes by running it in a background thread
  • Improve support for Slax Linux