Rufus is capable of downloading retail ISO DVD images of Windows 8.1, various builds of Windows 10 and Windows 11 directly from Microsoft's servers.

Rufus can also be used to compute the MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 hashes of the currently selected image. It supports formatting flash drives using FAT, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, UDF and ReFS filesystems. It also allows the installation of MS-DOS or FreeDOS onto a flash drive as well as the creation of Windows To Go bootable media. If needed, it will install a bootloader such as SYSLINUX or GRUB onto the flash drive to render it bootable. iso files, as well as raw disk image files (including compressed ones). iso files, including various Linux distributions and Windows installation. The last version compatible with Windows XP and Vista is 2.18, while the last version compatible with Windows 7 operating systems is Rufus 3.22, as Rufus 4.0 increased the minimum version requirement to require Windows 8 or later. UEFI boot support was introduced with version 1.3.2, localization with 1.4.0 and Windows To Go with 2.0. Until 1.2.0, two separate versions were provided, with one for MS-DOS and one for FreeDOS. Version 1.0.4 introduced FreeDOS support and version 1.1.0 introduced ISO image support. The first official release of Rufus, version 1.0.3 (earlier versions were internal/alpha only ), was released on December 04, 2011, with originally only MS-DOS support. Rufus was originally designed as a modern open source replacement for the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for Windows, which was primarily used to create DOS bootable USB flash drives.

Rufus (The Reliable USB Formatting Utility, with Source ) is a free and open-source portable application for Microsoft Windows that can be used to format and create bootable USB flash drives or Live USBs. Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese Brazilian, Portuguese Portugal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

Rufus software