Rufus is a utility for formatting and creating bootable USB media, such as USB sticks, flash memory, etc.
It is especially useful for cases where:
Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need!
Oh, and Rufus is fast. For example, it is about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer or Windows 7 USB Utility, for creating USB installation media from a Windows 7 ISO image.
It is also marginally faster for creating Linux bootable USB media.
The executable file is digitally signed, and the signature should read:
If you create a USB bootable disk with a non-US keyboard, Rufus tries to select a keyboard layout that matches the language of your system.
In this case, FreeDOS, which is the default selection, is recommended over MS-DOS, as it supports more international keyboard layouts.
All versions of Rufus, since version 1.1.0, support creating bootable USB media from an ISO image (.iso).
If you don't have an ISO file, creating such an image, from an optical disk or from a file set, is easy to do. You can just use one of the many free CD or DVD burning applications, such as CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn.
GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later.
You are free to distribute, modify or sell this software, as long as you comply with the GPLv3 license.
Rufus is produced 100% transparently, from its public source code, using a MinGW32 environment.