Rufus: instructions for creating a bootable USB flash drive

Probably, many users associated with the creation of bootable media, heard about a program like Rufus. The instruction for its use is quite simple. Nevertheless, there are a few key points and nuances that should be mentioned separately. For the Rufus 2.7 program, the instruction manual will be considered (although this modification is not currently relevant).

What is the Rufus program for?

The application is a universal tool for quickly creating bootable media, which serve as USB-devices. For the Rufus application, the instruction manual directly indicates that standard flash drives, external USB hard drives and even removable memory cards (their file system is supported) can act as carriers.

Immediately note that this program is focused exclusively on USB-devices, so that you can not create bootable media in the form of an optical disk or other hard disk.

Main application features

For Rufus, the instruction to create a bootable flash drive points to one interesting point related to some non-standard capabilities of the application.

The program itself is designed to work in the operating system environment of Windows, Linux, etc. (for Windows, modifications from XP to 10 are supported). But the most surprising thing is that the application is capable of creating BIOS and UEFI firmware or writing system images to work on computers on which any OS is missing.

In BIOS support, too, you will not refuse. For the Rufus application, the instruction indicates that both outdated versions are supported, and the newest ones are in the form of UEFI.

The scope of the program is quite wide. You can create bootable media not only when you want to install the operating system from scratch (or reinstall). It is actively used to restore OS and passwords. In addition, when writing to media, the application can find bad or problematic sectors, format or restore USB-drives.

Release Versions

To date, there are two main modifications of the program: fixed and portable. Places both versions take a little, and the difference is that all the settings for fixed modification are prescribed in the system registry keys, and for the portable one, a specially created settings file is used.

Program Rufus: the instruction. Beginning of work

No matter, the user started the portable or stationary version, in the first stage, the initial setting should be made.

The application interface is set to use English by default. Therefore, to begin with, you need to click on the globe icon located at the top right, and from the menu that appears, select Russian.

Note that the interface of the program (for Rufus the instruction directly points to this, and the user can verify with his own eyes) contains only one window in which all actions will be performed. This eliminates the possibility of pressing the wrong button or selecting the wrong parameter.

Choice of partition scheme

So, the program is running (until the flash drive is inserted, the main fields will be empty). Once the user inserts the device into the USB connector, the application determines the drive and fills in all the fields automatically!

If more than one device is connected, you can select one from the list. For an uninitiated person this is just a find, because in most cases the parameters set in the main fields need not be changed. The only exception is the recording method, but more on this later. But if you still need to make changes, consider each parameter separately.

At the initial stage, you need to select the type of partition. There are three options:

• MBR (boot record) for BIOS or UEFI;
• MBR for UEFI only;
• GPT for UEFI.

Which of these things to choose? The first option is universal. The second is for computers exclusively with UEFI systems. The third option should be selected only if the computer system uses a hard disk with a capacity of more than 2 GB.

Definition of the file system

For Rufus, the instruction in the next step is to select the file system. Normally, NTFS is offered by default.

But in principle, if the boot distribution (image) of the installed system is less than 4 GB in size, you can install FAT32. The cluster size, set by the program itself by default, can be left unchanged.

Volume label and formatting options

Next, you will need to specify a volume label (but this is not mandatory) and go to the formatting options. To save time, you can leave a quick format, but if there is any doubt that the media could be damaged, you can use full. In this case, you must leave a mark in the field of creating the bootable media.

Now the most important thing. From the drop-down menu, in most cases, you should choose to create a disk from the ISO image, then, using the browse button, you will need to specify the path to the source in the form of a pre-loaded or saved image of the future system.

Activate record

Finally, all preliminary actions are completed. Just in case, we check the settings again, just press the start button and agree with the notification that all data on the device will be destroyed during the formatting process.

Then you just have to wait until the end of the recording process. As claimed by the developers themselves, the process, for example, for the image of Windows 7, can take about 5-10 minutes, no more. It is believed that this indicator is minimal among all programs with which you can create bootable USB-media.

Rufus: instruction (Windows 10). Using Windows To Go

More interesting is the version of the program 2.0 and above, used in Windows 8 and 10. When you use it in the main window, you can see a special line of Windows To Go, which you want to use instead of the standard installation of the system.

What it is? It turns out that this method of creating bootable media is designed to write to the media information in such a way that when you boot from it you can run a full-fledged Windows Enterprise OS and work with it as with a regular OS!

However, in the process of recording, you must observe some important conditions. First of all, it is claimed, it is required to use only USB-drives recommended by Microsoft Corporation (if Windows is needed as the working OS). The second condition is that the drive must have a capacity of at least 32 GB. Otherwise, the whole process is completely identical to the steps described above. The only thing you should pay attention to is installing as a NTFS file system (by no means FAT).

Conclusion

As an afterword, it remains to say that the program really looks very convenient and fast. This is confirmed not only by many users, but also by professional experts. In addition, it's not difficult even to understand the application with a person who has never worked in the life of creating bootable media and is going to do it for the first time. The presence of just one window (working area) and almost complete automation speak only in favor of this application. Not surprisingly, it deserved so many flattering reviews.

By the way, the speed of recording is especially noted. Even the portable version works so fast that many similar heavy packages never dreamed of it. And if you consider that you can use the USB 3.0 standard, the recording speed is incredible. In addition, the creation of a media with a full-fledged working system generally generates genuine admiration.