rufus

The reliable USB formatting utility, according to its own description, covering bootable drive creation, checksums, and UEFI validation for Windows and Linux.

The project calls itself the reliable USB formatting utility. The capability list is long: format USB, flash card, and virtual drives to FAT, FAT32, NTFS, UDF, exFAT, ReFS, ext2, and ext3; create DOS bootable USB drives using FreeDOS or MS-DOS; and create BIOS or UEFI bootable drives, including UEFI bootable NTFS. It also builds bootable drives from bootable ISOs, including Windows and Linux, and from bootable disk images, including compressed ones. Windows 11 installation drives for PCs without TPM or Secure Boot, Windows To Go drives, and VHD, DD, VHDX, and FFU images of existing drives are all in scope, along with persistent Linux partitions. The project is written in C under the GPL-3.0 license, with the homepage at rufus.ie.

Rufus can compute MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 checksums of a selected image, which helps verify downloads. It also performs runtime validation of UEFI bootable media. On the transparency side, the project says the tool provides extensive information about what it is doing, through an easily accessible log or the Windows debug facility.

Build options are Visual Studio 2026 or MinGW, invoking the solution file for the former and configure with make for the latter. The two build paths cover both Windows-native and MinGW toolchains. The project is OSI compliant open source, and the README notes that the freely available Visual Studio Community Edition can be used to build, run, or develop for Rufus, for individuals and corporate users alike.

• Source 1 · Project repository
• Source 2 · README