What Rufus does
Rufus is a free, open-source utility that creates bootable USB drives from ISO image files. It is maintained by Pete Batard and hosted publicly on GitHub under the GNU General Public License. The full standalone installer is available directly from the official GitHub releases page, so no internet connection is required during setup. The tool's primary purpose is turning a blank USB drive into bootable installation media for operating systems such as Windows and Linux distributions. It handles both legacy BIOS systems using MBR partition schemes and modern UEFI systems using GPT partition schemes, making it suitable for a wide range of hardware generations. Rufus runs on Windows and does not require installation — it ships as a single portable executable that can be stored on a USB drive or any folder and launched directly. This portability makes it convenient for technicians who carry a toolkit across multiple machines. When writing a drive, Rufus lets you choose from common file systems including FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, and UDF, depending on the target and the intended use. It also supports DD image mode for writing disk images that are not standard ISO files. For Windows installations, Rufus offers optional customization of the setup process, including the ability to adjust certain installer checks at the time the bootable drive is created. Additionally, Rufus can download official Windows ISO images directly from Microsoft's servers, so users can obtain and write installation media in a single workflow. It also computes checksums so you can verify the integrity of an ISO before writing. Rufus is intended for system administrators, IT support technicians, and technically inclined general users who need to install or recover operating systems. To ensure you receive an unmodified copy, download only from the official publisher's page at github.com.
