WHAT IS RUFUS?
Created by Pete Batard in Dec'11, Rufus is a 'Live USB' type of application. It is most stable with the latest v3.19 released on 1st July 2022. Rufus is a replacement for the previous USB disk formatting tool available in windows. This earlier tool was used to create DOS bootable USB flash drives.
Rufus is free, open-sourced, trustworthy, and certified with GNU GPL licenses. These GNU General Public License is a group of licenses available for free software that indicate an assurance that the user has full control and freedom to run, study, modify and share the software.
System Requirements
- Windows 7 or higher
- 32Bit or 64Bit are both compatible
Features
- If you ever need to install an operating system because you do not have one, then feel free to use Rufus. Rufus Installer file size is merely 1.1MB.
- Supports a range of bootable files like windows installation.
- iso files and Linux distributions Also supports raw disk image files (compressed or not) and android OS (BlissOS).
- It allows you to install MS-DOS or FreeDOS on a USB flash drive.
- It can be used to format USB by FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, and UDF file systems.
- It allows the creation of ‘Windows To Go’ bootable media.
- In a selected image, Rufus can be used to compute various hashes like SHA-1, SHA-256 & MD5 Rufus enables the user to directly access Microsoft servers to download various builds of Windows10 and Windows11 along with retail ISO-DVD images of Windows8.1.
How to Download and install?
- Download the Rufus tool from the official website.
- Make sure you download the latest version.
- Small size of tool (~1.5MB) takes just a few seconds to download
- Right click on the downloaded file and “Run as administrator”.
- Allow “the app to make changes to your device” by clicking “Yes”.
- The Rufus software is successfully installed!
How to use Rufus?
Rufus is one of the best ways to create an "ISO image" on a USB device. You would require the following to get started:
- USB flash drive (according to the size of desired IOS)
- The required operating system (Windows10, vista, MacOS, etc)
Steps to be followed are as follows:
- Open Rufus.
- Plug in the USB device.
- When Rufus automatically detects your USB
- Select the correct device from the drop-down menu.
- Select the disk or ISO image under boot selection
- Rufus will open file explorer. Search for the ISO image to burn.
- Select the said ISO image.
- v3.5 and above of Rufus has the option to directly download the image of Windows8.1 or Windows10 from the Rufus website itself. It's situated in the drop-down beside the ‘select’ option.
- Create a Standard Windows installation, and Rufus will automatically prompt the ideal Partition Scheme depending on your system.
- Name the Volume label if you wish to and keep the settings for the File system and Cluster size as they are.
- Click start
- there’s an error message if the USB device isn’t large enough. If this happens, start again with a different larger USB.
- There’s a warning saying the USB will be formatted and cleaned of any data in it. Click OK to continue imaging.
- Once the imaging is done, you can close Rufus and the USB is ready and bootable.