Project Title

rufus — The Reliable USB Formatting Utility for Creating Bootable USB Drives

Overview

Rufus is a utility designed to format and create bootable USB flash drives, offering a wide range of features for various use cases. It stands out for its support of multiple file systems, bootable drive creation from ISOs, and compatibility with both BIOS and UEFI systems. Rufus is known for its user-friendly interface and extensive language support, making it a popular choice for system administrators and developers.

Key Features

Supports formatting to FAT/FAT32/NTFS/UDF/exFAT/ReFS/ext2/ext3
Creates bootable drives from ISOs and disk images, including compressed ones
Compatible with both BIOS and UEFI bootable drives
Downloads official Microsoft Windows 8, 10, or 11 retail ISOs
Computes checksums (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512) of selected images
Performs runtime validation of UEFI bootable media

Use Cases

System administrators use Rufus to create bootable drives for system installations and recovery.
Developers use Rufus to test and deploy software on different systems using bootable USB drives.
End-users create bootable drives for data recovery or to run live operating systems.

Advantages

Supports a wide range of file systems and bootable drive creation methods.
Offers a modern and familiar UI with 38 languages natively supported.
Portable and secure, with no installation required.

Limitations / Considerations

Rufus is primarily designed for Windows environments, limiting its cross-platform usability.
The project's license is not explicitly stated, which might be a concern for some users.

UNetbootin: A similar utility for creating bootable drives, but with a focus on Linux distributions. It differs in its user interface and supported platforms.
balenaEtcher: A cross-platform tool for writing images to SD cards and USB drives. It offers a simpler interface and supports macOS and Linux in addition to Windows.

Basic Information

GitHub: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus
Stars: 32,502
License: Unknown
Last Commit: 2025-09-04

📊 Project Information

Project Name: rufus
GitHub URL: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus
Programming Language: C
⭐ Stars: 32,502
🍴 Forks: 2,803
📅 Created: 2011-11-19
🔄 Last Updated: 2025-09-04

🏷️ Project Topics

Topics: [, ", b, i, o, s, ", ,, , ", b, o, o, t, ", ,, , ", b, o, o, t, a, b, l, e, -, d, r, i, v, e, s, ", ,, , ", f, r, e, e, d, o, s, ", ,, , ", g, p, t, ", ,, , ", g, r, u, b, ", ,, , ", g, r, u, b, 4, d, o, s, ", ,, , ", i, s, o, ", ,, , ", m, b, r, ", ,, , ", m, d, 5, ", ,, , ", p, e, r, s, i, s, t, e, n, c, e, ", ,, , ", r, u, f, u, s, ", ,, , ", s, e, c, u, r, e, -, b, o, o, t, ", ,, , ", s, h, a, 1, ", ,, , ", s, h, a, 2, 5, 6, ", ,, , ", s, y, s, l, i, n, u, x, ", ,, , ", u, e, f, i, ", ,, , ", u, s, b, ", ,, , ", w, i, n, d, o, w, s, ", ,, , ", w, i, n, d, o, w, s, -, t, o, -, g, o, ", ]