Rufus 4.6: Create Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows and Linux (2025)

- Last updated on October 22, 2024by VG

UPDATE: Rufus 4.6 stable version is available for download which comes with new features, changes and bug fixes mentioned below in this article.

Creating a bootable USB drive might come very handy when you don’t have access to CD/DVD drive in a computer system or don’t have the setup disk to install Windows or a Linux distro in your PC.

You can create a bootable USB pen drive for Windows or Linux setup and then boot your system using it and then you can install the OS without any worries. It also makes the installation a little bit faster compared to installing via setup CD/DVD.

Creating bootable USB is not an easy task. You need to run some DOS commands and copy the setup files from your hard disk to USB stick. There are many free software available which allow you to automatically and quickly create bootable USB drives to install Windows and Linux which can be found at following link:

Ultimate Collection of Best Freeware to Create Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows and Linux

What is Rufus?

Today we are going to share another free tool “Rufus” developed by Pete Batard. It allows you to format and create bootable USB drives for Windows and Linux which might come handy in following situations:

• Create USB installation media using bootable ISO or IMG image files (Windows, Linux, Android, etc.)
• Want to burn ISO to USB drives
• Need to work on a system that doesn’t have an OS installed
• Need to format a USB drive
• Need to check your device for bad blocks
• Need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
• Want to run a low-level utility

Rufus is portable so you don’t need to install it. Just run its EXE file and you are ready to create bootable USB drive. It’s very small in size and you can carry it on your USB drive.

The most impressive thing about this tool is its interface. It looks very close to default format window which is shown by Windows whenever you try to format a hard disk partition or a USB drive.

Rufus Features List

The app developer claims that Rufus is very fast compared to other free software available for the same task such as UNetbootin, Windows 7 USB download tool, etc.

Also once formatted using this tool, your USB drive is still usable as before to transfer data. It doesn’t have to be dedicated for DOS or installation only.

This small utility also allows you to check the device for bad blocks. Up to 4 passes can be selected to find out if your device is defected.

This free utility can be used in Windows 7 and all later Windows versions such as Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows 11. It can be used in both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows editions.

NOTE: Newer versions of Rufus (v4.0 and later) require Windows 8 or later and default to a 64-bit executable.

You can create bootable USB drive for Windows and almost all popular Linux distro such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, Gentoo, Knoppix, etc. You can also create bootable USB drive to install or test Google Android OS in your Desktop PC or laptop. Just download a ported ISO file of Android OS and write it to your USB drive using this little tool.

Rufus comes with FreeDOS support. If you use a non-US keyboard, FreeDOS is recommended as it supports more keyboard layouts. In both cases, if you choose DOS, this freeware will try to set the keyboard locale for you.

What’s New in Rufus 4.6 Stable Version

The latest stable version of Rufus comes with following features and improvements:

• Added a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions
• Added TimeZone to regional options replication
• Set local account passwords to not expire by default
• Fixed an error when trying to write compressed VHD images
• Fixed an error when invoking Rufus from the PowerShell commandline
• Improved revoked UEFI bootloaders check to support Linux SBAT, Windows SVN and cert DBX
• Improved support for ReactOS boot media

Download Link of Rufus Latest Version

You can download Rufus stable and beta testing versions using following links:

Download Rufus Stable Version

Download Rufus Beta Version

Thanks to our reader “Irving Prais” for sharing it…

PS: Also check following article to create bootable USB drive for Windows ISO using Rufus:

[Tip] How to Create Bootable USB Drive for Windows 10 ISO