Rufus: The Reliable USB Formatting Utility

Rufus logo

Rufus is a utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives.

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
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 11 installation drives for PCs that don’t have TPM or Secure Boot
Create Windows To Go drives
Create VHD/DD, VHDX and FFU images of an existing drive
Create persistent Linux partitions
Compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and SHA-512 checksums of the selected image
Perform runtime validation of UEFI bootable media
Improve Windows installation experience by automatically setting up OOBE parameters (local account, privacy options, etc.)
Perform bad blocks checks, including detection of “fake” flash drives
Download official Microsoft Windows 8, Windows 10 or Windows 11 retail ISOs
Download UEFI Shell ISOs
Modern and familiar UI, with 38 languages natively supported
Small footprint. No installation required.
Portable. Secure Boot compatible.
100% Free Software (GPL v3)

Compilation

Use either Visual Studio 2022 or MinGW and then invoke the .sln or configure/make respectively.

Visual Studio

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.

Enhancements/Bugs

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