Rufus

Rufus is an open-source utility for Windows that formats USB flash drives and prepares them as bootable media. It is intended for users who need to create installation, recovery, diagnostic, or other bootable drives from a computer. Rufus can format USB drives, flash cards, and virtual drives using FAT, FAT32, NTFS, UDF, exFAT, ReFS, ext2, or ext3.

It can create DOS bootable USB drives using FreeDOS or MS-DOS. The program supports BIOS and UEFI bootable drives, including UEFI bootable media formatted with NTFS. It can create bootable drives from ISO files for systems such as Windows and Linux.

It also supports bootable disk images, including compressed image files. Rufus can create Windows 11 installation drives for computers that do not have TPM or Secure Boot. It can create Windows To Go drives for running Windows from supported removable media.

The utility can produce VHD, VHDX, and FFU images from an existing drive. It also supports the creation of persistent Linux partitions. Users can compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 checksums for a selected image.

Rufus can perform runtime validation of UEFI bootable media. It can automatically set certain Windows installation OOBE parameters, including local account and privacy options. The program can check for bad blocks and help detect fake flash drives.

It can download official retail ISO files for Windows 8, Windows 10, and Windows 11, as well as UEFI Shell ISO files. Rufus has a modern, familiar interface with native support for 38 languages. It has a small footprint, requires no installation, is portable, and is compatible with Secure Boot.

MirrorNest distributes the official Rufus build from its own storage after scanning it for malware with ClamAV.