pbatard/rufus

The Reliable USB Formatting Utility

Rufus: The Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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
• 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.

• Official Website
• FAQ

Enhancements/Bugs

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

rufus's Issues

ER: add iPXE as a boot option

FreeDOS locale files should not be set as hidden

Drive may not be listed in explorer after formatting

ER: GPT support

Required for Windows 7, Windows 8 and other UEFI aware images.
Will need an EFI BIOS to be able to test bootable GPT, so this may have to wait

[UPDATE 2012.01.30 - I now have an UEFI system to test with]

Fedora doesn't boot properly with Rufus v1.1.1

Boot process eventually fails with:
Warning: No root device "live:/dev/disk/by-label/Fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop.iso" found

This is the same issue of trying to locate the installation media by label that we had with Arch Linux. Unlike Arch Linux however, the label expected by the Fedora installation process is not FAT compatible, therefore the issue will have to be fixed on Fedora's end.

Created Bug 794821: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=794821

Linux distros such as Archlinux expect a specific label for the USB drive

Tested with archlinux-2011.08.19-netinstall-i686.iso. The boot process will fail if the USB drive isn't labelled "ARCH_201108" which is the same label as the ISO.

On ISO selection, Rufus should change the proposed label to reflect the one from the ISO.

ER: Disable indexing support for NTFS

If we're letting users choose if they want compressed NTFS, we may as well let them choose if they want indexed NTFS as well.

ISO label should not be used when switching to MS-DOS

Some cluster sizes need to be disabled according to drive size

For instance, for a 32 MB USB key, Explorer's format only allows 512 - 4096 bytes as valid cluster sizes, rather than the whole range

ER: allow ISO -> bootable USB conversion

Universal-USB-Installer does something similar, and it is quite useful.

ER: FreeDOS - add country selection

Exception/Write access violation when patching COMMAND.COM & IO.SYS

Looks like Windows doesn't exactly like patching resources within DLLs after all (but still does it):

Patching COMMAND.COM...
&DiskImage[filestart(=4200)+0x650c] = 0x000007fef0ee31e4
First-chance exception at 0x000000013f8df40b in rufus_fd.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x000007fef0ee31e8.

Turn off autoplay while the app is running

Autoplay is quite annoying when plugging USB drives repeatedly. As it it controlled with the local group policies, we can use a method similar to what we've done in libwdi to temporarily disable it while the application is running.

ER: Produce a more detailed report when bad blocks are found

Creating a report file, with the failed bad block numbers would be nice.

FreeDOS: Drive is too large to handle, using only 1st 8 GB

Occurs when booting a 15 GB ADATA USB flash drive on a GigaByte platform only - BIOS issue?
WinME DOS does see a 15 GB drive however.
FreeDOS still boots but produces 4 of these messages.

Access is denied when trying to run format again

Tested with ADATA 15GB and rufus_fd: if you attempt to reformat a drive that has just been formatted, you get access denied (unable to open for end users).

Device scanning fails to find USB drive

I have tried Rufus on two of my computers, both of which have two optical drives attached, and both have the same problem -- Rufus fails to find the USB drive. These computers are running 64-bit Windows 7.

Rufus only displays "NO_LABEL (E:)" and all of the other boxes are blank. No other device choices are listed, just the E:, even though I have a SSD at C:, optical drives at D: and E:, and a USB drive at F:

ER: Rufus UI should remember previous selection

When switching drives or FS, Rufus should remember what the options were and re-select them if available. If multiple drives are available, it should also reselect the one that was just formatted.

FreeDOS reports suspect partitions at boot

Eg., with a 32 MB drive:

 - InitDiskWARNING: using suspect partition Pri:1 FS 0e: with calculated values
   1-0-1 instead of     0-1-1
WARNING: using suspect partition Pri:1 FS 0e: with calculated values 1006-0-46 i
nstead of 2-254-63
C: HD1, Pri[ 1], CHS=    1-0-1, start=     0 MB, size=     30 MB

Disabling autoplay while Rufus is running would be nice

just sayin'...

ER: Add ReactOS freeldr support to boot BartPE and older WinPE ISOs

ER: allow bootable floppy disk creation

For both WinMe and FreeDOS

FAT16 and FAT32 drives created in XP don't boot properly

This seems to be due to XP using 0x00 (floppy) for Physical Drive Number, whereas Windows 7 uses 0x80.
See offset 36 from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140418

Also see http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=24424

Will be fixed in .92

ER: NTFS partition boot record

Needed for ISO support if any of the ISO files are > 4 GB (eg: Windows 8 x64 developer preview).
Requires a modification of the ms-sys files.

ER: Set an icon for USB drives that don't have one

A simple autorun.inf should do with:

[autorun]
label = <Label set by the Rufus user>
icon  = rufus.ico

Add FreeDOS support

Win98 MS-DOS is fine and all, but a little choice goes a long way.
http://www.freedos.org/

Progress bar is not updated properly on ISO

"UpdateProgress(6): rounding error - pos 72087 is greater than 65534" due to reshuffle of MBR/ISO extraction order. Fix this.

Allow preservation of MBR/partition table when possible

For instance, if FAT/NTFS partition(s) already exist, the user should be given the choice to reuse the one of their choice, instead of repartitioning the whole disk with a single partition.

ER: If there exists an autorun.inf with a label, use that one

This allows setting and reusing non-English labels on FAT volumes.

ER: Allow the provision of external DOS files

NB: this may have an impact on the keyboard locale setup. Should probably come after #2 and #3 have been completed.

openSUSE doesn't boot with Rufus v1.1.1

What the hell is wrong with these people, and why don't they just use the default isolinux repositories?
Anyway, the issue is that openSUSE's isolinux config files reside in \boot\i386\loader\ which, just like Hiren's boot CD, is nonstandard. If you move these files to an isolinux standard location, everything is fine.

If we're going to see many of these, maybe I should patch ldlinux to also seek into a location that is provided by Rufus...

Unicode volume names are not displayed

If a volume is formatted as NTFS and contains extended characters, they are displayed as question marks

ER: Add Syslinux support

Speed up ISO extraction on small files

The CloseHandle() calls are costly for small files as they appear to flush the USB buffer.
By delaying these calls and issuing them in bulk, it may be possible to speed up the writing of small files.

Issue with focus on the select ISO button

May lose/have focus when it shouldn't

ER: Support to boot Virtual file-disks (VMDK, VHD)

Suggested by sambul61 in http://reboot.pro/16374/

FreeDOS asks to set date and time at boot

Linux Mint doesn't work with Rufus v1.1.1

Syslinux produces the error "vesamenu.c32 not a COM32R image".

ER: make locale setup optional

ER: Enable compression for NTFS

ER: Add detection for unmounted volumes

An USB volume may not always have a drive letter assigned. Rufus should duplicate part of the features of C:\Windows\System32\mountvol.exe and try to mount such volumes to allow formatting.

ER: Create separate FreeDOS and non FreeDOS versions of Rufus

ER: Bootable NTFS/exFAT

http://www.wintobootic.com/ seems to be able to create bootable NTFS USB drives, though these seem to require an NTLDR and probably other file...

Hiren's boot CD doesn't boot with Rufus v1.1.1

This is because those guys have their isolinux.cfg in HBCD\ for some weird reason. Tested with Hiren's.BootCD.15.1.iso
Can be fixed by adding HBCD to the syslinux conf directory list.

ER: Allow preservation of MBR/partition table when possible

For instance, if FAT/NTFS partition(s) already exist, the user should be given the choice to reuse the one of their choice, instead of repartitioning the whole disk with a single partition.

ER: provide our own vesamenu.c32

Linux Mint and Trinity Rescue Kit use a vesamenu.c32 that is incompatible with recent Syslinux (see #41).
It should be possible to identify older vesamenu.c32 and replace it with a more recent ones.
However vesamenu.c32 is about as big as Rufus, so we may want to propose retrieving it from online it instead of embedding it.

Add badblock check support

integrate e2fsprogs badblock check:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git;a=blob;f=misc/badblocks.c

Crash during format under XP

This is due to FCC_DONE_WITH_STRUCTURE not passing a valid pointer to a string under XP, as is the case on Vista or later, which we still try to display in debug.

Will be fixed in .92

ER: Set DOS keyboard according to locale

Create an AUTOEXEC.BAT according to locale, eg.

mode con codepage prepare=((850) ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=850
keyb uk,,keyboard.sys

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/117850

ER: Detect card insertion in memory card readers

Insertion of a flash card in a card reader does not generate a WM_DEVICECHANGE message, therefore it is not detected by Rufus.

However, as per http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2420131/detect-insertion-of-media-into-a-drive-using-windows-messages, it should be possible to use SHChangeNotifyRegister