Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility | Hacker News Reader

Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

github.com

589 pointsquyleanh201 comments

Well have to say Rufus is good. But there is a far better tool: Ventoy.

You will only need to format your thumb drive once and for all. After that, you will simply only need to copy the image file such as .iso, .vhd etc on to the drive and you are all set. Check details from the following sites.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

Holy whackamoly! Booting directly from .iso files on a thumb drive? What kind of black magic is that?

This is the neatest thing I've seen on HN since the actually portable executable!

as stated elsewhere, the magic is that grub is able to directly boot a iso.

Not just iso files, it'll boot vhd's as well.

This is the real insane feature for me. Wow.

I have been searching for something like that for ages.

Yes I just discovered this lastweek It worked fine from Linux.

I only had to patch script: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/pull/877

I guess it will be valuable to ship this in distros no ?

I know back in the day, there was a very similar tool called SARDU [0]. It is closed source from what I know, so if that was your breaking point, fair enough.

EDIT: There have also been YUMI and Easy2Boot in a similar vein before Ventoy.

[0]: https://www.sarducd.it/

For ages, there have been Zalman enclosures for making ISO-based multi-bootable external HDDs/SSDs working this way and on a lower level. And iodd which are essentially the same (AFAIK Zalman rebranded them).

so cool what is this fuckery

GRUB

Wow, this has justified an entire year's worth of Hacker News dues in one go.

Yes, this is beyond awesome. Have 64G one with all the ubuntus, CentOS, windows, grml with my keys.

Life saver.

For the benefit of those who may not know, this has been possible (by way of Grub2) with many Linux distros for a while now without custom software. Typically you just add extra boot arguments that point to the iso and flag that booting from it is desired.

Unfortunately the required arguments tend to be poorly documented and quite specific to each distro. This looks like a neat tool that's sidestepping that issue. If anyone knows of a good resource that documents these boot arguments for a range of distros, please share!

Are you referring to grub2iso[1]? If so, I was never able to make it work: either the ISO is too large (IIRC, in the old days it needed to load the full ISO to memory), or, if it did boot, the kernel wouldn't find the ISO ("virtual drive") itself.

I only got it to work with simple things that load fully from RAM -- say, debian-installer, which only requires kernel+initrd.

It has to be simple and reliable. If it's only one of them, I would rather carry an extra USB stick which I can always format (I do).

[1]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

It was painful but I got Ubuntu ISO working with

  loopback loop (hd0,gpt1)/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  set root=(loop)
  configfile /boot/grub/loopback.cfg

which in turn seems to load the kernel via

  linux  /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  initrd /casper/initrd

if you just make sure your path doesn't have spaces. (I forget if you also need to pass boot=casper or not.)

You'll have to detect the disk though. It's possible to automate it somewhat, but not trivial (at least if you don't know how). You'll want to use search. https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/sear...

And make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware if necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.

Assuming you loopback mount the ISO, I think these are the major args... fill in the "..." wherever you see them:

  # Ubuntu
  linux .../vmlinuz boot=casper file=.../ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=...
  initrd ...

  # Arch
  linux .../vmlinuz img_dev=... img_loop=... earlymodules=loop
  initrd ..._ucode.img .../archiso.img

  # Kali
  linux ... boot=live components findiso=... # noautomount
  initrd ...

  # GParted
  linux ... boot=live union=overlay config components toram=....squashfs findiso=...
  initrd ...

In general you'll have to boot the kernels directly as shown above. Using the built-in GRUB menus won't work in many cases. Which makes it difficult to make these future-proof.

You'll also want to make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware as necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.

Best of luck getting a robust boot menu script going. Expect to spend weeks if not months on it if you're new to GRUB scripts/components.

And you can find an aggregated list of grub files for various distro's at aguslr's multibootusb:

https://github.com/aguslr/multibootusb/tree/master/mbusb.d

You can also add toram to copy the entire squashfs root to memory. This way you get better performance, and don't need to keep your USB disk plugged in.

Previous post on Ventoy for some discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241485

FWIW I couldn’t get Ventoy working a while back, from MacOS, trying to boot to a Windows ISO for a bootcamp installation. That said, fully appreciate this is a tricky endeavour at the best of times!

The windows installer iso never works. You have to build a bootable PE environment and then have a folder with the install files to run.

Another vote for ventoy. Means I can use my large fast USB drive (actually an mSATA SSD pulled from a broken laptop, in an adapter) as a collection of boot media while keeping the rest of the space for other use. I don't need to boot from a distro CD often these day, but when I do it is nice that it is much faster than my other USB sticks, more convenient than carrying a few (Debian, Ubuntu, psSense, Kali, ...) around, and more convenient to update when I need something new or otherwise specific for the situation.

I use a 128GB m.2 SSD in a stick enclosure with USB A on one end and USB C on the other. Whole package was $30 from Amazon.

Interesting, do you have a link?

Yeah, the adapter was cheap. I already had a working drive to go into it.

Ventoy is indeed one of the best (if not THE best) tool for this. Even if it does not support absolutely everything (last time I checked), it is by far the most hassle free and sure-fire solution.

For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004. I honestly don't care to remember all the odd issues/failures I've encountered during those 17 years. The situation certainly got better/easier with the years, but it can still be a gamble if an odd Linux distro will actually boot successfully from USB or not.

Until I discovered Ventoy, about a year or two ago, I would always be hesitant to recommend running Linux from USB, unless I knew the exact setup (or it involved someone with a decent technical skills).

Ventoy is great!!! I'd recommend everyone to at least have a look at it. It's one of the very few tools I endorse without any hesitation or reservation.

I am in no way personally involved with Ventoy, nor do I have a stake in it. I just love the tool for what it is.

> For context, I have professionally deployed Linux on USB, ever since around 2004.

Could you point to some good sources that explain in detail the whole "bootable USB" world? It seems it's always a hassle to get right, especially when preparing a Windows bootable USB.

rufus is good for preparing a windows bootable usb with uefi boot (so you can later enable secure boot, after install), so stick to that. ventoy is great, might be better than rufus, when you want multiple os's on a stick, but for the average person it's also way more complex than rufus. (rufus only works on windows tough)

I have a couple of old dusty laptops at work, that I think are just old enough to have 32bit uefi (or bios?) and cpu with 64bit support. Are there any current distros that should work, I wonder?

I suppose I could dig up an old Debian Iso-but I'd prefer something with a recent-ish kernel (wireguard) and a half-secure libssl and opensshd.

Hm, maybe openbsd (current) still has support?

Ed: I've been doing Linux installs since the 90s... Around kernel 1.3 or there abouts - but it's been a while since dipped my toes in 32bit/hybrid x86 systems. .

A great software solution. I had a look and once Linux boots it actually uses devicemapper to map a dm device to the raw sectors containing the iso which it extracts (as it may be fragmented) to feed to dmsetup. Kinda crazy.

There is also a couple of hardware projects that to that in hardware. I used the ISOstick for many years.

You can also PXE NetBoot a lot of installers with dynamic menu selection - see http://netboot.xyz

I tried Ventoy several months ago, and go back to Rufus because it can’t boot EndeavourOS. That’s weird because every comment I saw about Ventoy is positive.

Does EndeavourOS support EFI boot? If not it won't work, but if so then drop a note to admin@ventoy.net and let them know!

This is anecdotal. I've been able to successfully install boot and install EndeavourOS with Ventoy. I've not done anything special - just install Ventoy "sh ./Ventoy2disk.sh -i /dev/sdb", copied the iso over and booted.

I just wrote Ventoy to my megastick, wrote FreeBSD and Debian Install images, and it works. Debian Bullseye install image complains about low-memory mode, but the booted machine had >500MB still available. Abstraction breaks somewhere, I would love to know why/how.

Without diving into the source code. :) Has anyone seen architecture/design documents on how it actually mounts the ISO file and "boots" from it? What does prevent "the other 10%" from not working?

I looked through the docs, found these so far:

Memdisk[1] section mentions:

> In normal mode, Ventoy will only read the iso file at booting time, and only read the content needed for boot.

Ventoy Compatible?[2] mentions a hook. What does this mean?

> Once Ventoy treats the iso file as Ventoy Compatible, it will just make the virtual disk and will not do the hook.

[1]: https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_memdisk.html

[2]: https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_compatible_mark.html

Silly question, but...is your megastick just a large-capacity USB stick?

Yes.

UNetbootin has done this since 2007:

<https://unetbootin.github.io/>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin>

This is barely a year old and comes all, besides a handful of comments, from one account https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/graphs/contributors

Personally and subjective this rings quite some alarm bells for me, seems just a bit sketchy and in any way really young, so not as much time out on the field and thus possibly not as much bugs shaken out...

UNetbootin doesn't support multiple installs on the same device.

That doesn't look like it does the same thing at all.

I'm not sure why a piece of software being built by one person is sketchy but ok.

It is similar though, but yes it misses the "more ISOs" part, which I actually find weird because at that point that would be almost cheap to do - that's why I did not reverified that bit, sorry.

Unetbootin either dumps the raw ISO directly to the block device or, in the case of Windows, extracts it to an exFAT partition. Ventoy doesn't require you to extract or dump the ISOs at all, which is where the real beauty of it lies.

From wikipedia[1]:

> Multiple installs on the same device are not supported.

If one is limited to a single usb-stick per ISO, it's just easier to dd the installation image: run it the way it's (hopefully[x]) been tested by the vendors.

Ventoy is a different ballgame: drag & drop ISO file and boot from it. I tested it this morning with 3 things I carry around myself (debian-live, debian-installer, freebsd release installer), and it worked. 1 stick instead of 3, and I still have the remaining exFAT partition for other things. And a spare encrypted partition if I wanted to (I don't).

Regarding bugs -- it works or it doesn't for your distribution. I think it's remarkable what this, seemingly single developer, has achieved over a bit more than a year[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNetbootin

[2]: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/commit/2090c6fa978999d4ef1e...

[x]: don't get me started with Intel SSD firmware "bootable" images.

Just tried it because it seem great and it booted parted magic fine but trying to boot on W10 20H2 iso just got me stuck on a black window inside ventoy.

Too bad because I'd really like to have a single USB with everything I could really carry around instead of a bunch of small one.

Have you tried YUMI? https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

I've used it to successfully boot into both Windows and Linux. Although it's is only available for Windows, there seems to be a Linux counterpart as well, which I've never tried out: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/multiboot-create-a-multiboot-u...

Wow! Thanks for the heads up on Ventoy!

The only reason I even keep an old Windows based laptop around for was to burn ISO’s to flash drives with Rufus for repairing computers of friends and family members.

What a great tool! There goes my collection of small old 1-8 GB USB thumb drives, just use a big one for installs.

A nice companion could be a small *PI like board with a script that scans repositories for iso updates then downloads them using torrent to avoid taxing the servers too much, then when necessary (but not more than once every N days to avoid wearing the memory) updates the dongle automatically overnight. Just stick the dongle when you're back at home and the next morning if necessary it is updated to the latest images.

I keep hearing great things about GRC's InitDisk. Unfortunately it's windows-only, but it's able to format almost anything you throw at it:

https://www.grc.com/initdisk.htm

Thanks for this, indeed I've been able to recover a stick that went non-visible anymore, by using InitDisk

One use case not covered by Ventoy is building the USB equivalent of a DOS boot disk, useful for flashing BIOSes.

Wow this is super handy!

That is a really cool project -- but, Rufus also works for boot media for machines that don't support UEFI/BIOS.

I use Ventoy on a 500 GB portable SSD. I have Windows 10, FreeBSD, and multiple versions of each distro on it just in case. It even works with TempleOS.

All it needs now is some way to keep persistent files and I'll never need another thumb drive to install an OS.

> You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).

What the heck! How does anything else still exist!

Rufus has other use cases: imaging distros for Raspberry Pi, and (especially handy) reformat HFS, APFS and Ext4 pendrives for FAT or NTFS under Windows without jumping through hoops.

Balena Etcher is great for imaging rpi as well.

It is not. hundred+ MB electron app, instead Rufus being few hundreds of KB and around 10x more flexible in corner cases.

I really despise BE from engineering perspective.

It never occurred to me to judge a flashing tool based on its internal architecture and language/framework choice.

I judge it based on whether I get a bootable bit of flash out the other side.

Rufus is just straight-up better, though? It's smaller, faster, more configurable, doesn't require installation, doesn't opt you in to analytics (wtf are they even analyzing?), and doesn't advertise the developer's other projects.

Even ignoring those last two, which just seem gross, running an entire web browser to accomplish the same thing as a 1MB native application is like using an anvil as a hammer. Yeah, it'll work, but why?

I don’t know if it’s better; it seems like it could easily be as good, but I’ll check it out the first time Etcher fails to make a working flash drive.

Rufus has made multiple unbootable drives in the years that I've used it. Etcher has yet to made one and I used to flash drives constantly - multiple daily - until I switched to Ventoy which is the way forward now.

Besides that, every single of maybe a few dozen times i tried it, it said checksum error after verification. On different systems, with different media. Interestingly there were no errors in reality. I dismissed it as a well meaning toy for dummies. Or maybe data gathering spyware.

Thouroughly unimpressed with it and any project recommending or even insisting on using it.

I wouldn't say "far better". It's different. Rufus is superb for specific tasks.

I especially like the interface, including the automatic download of the current Windows 10 ISO. I find the whole process (and more importantly, walking others through the process) a breeze.

I like the cheat mode codes that let me walk people through tasks easily, but still retaining functionality I want for myself. https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#Power_keysCheat_mo... Alt+E being one that I use myself, but absolutely would not want enabled for a novice user.

That's not to take anything away from Ventoy (although I'm an IODD user myself). Just saying one is better or worse doesn't feel fair to me.

This is amazing. Thank you!

Windows images that are over 4.3GB(I don't remember the exact max size) most image burning tools will fallback to NTFS on the USB formatting and some motherboards/laptops don't like this. (Even on my rather modern Dell laptop)

The best solution so far I've found is to manually partition the USB into a 1GB FAT32 partition and the rest NTFS. Then you extract the files where needed [0]

I learned this method just last year but it seems it's pretty universal. At least for Win10 ISOs. And I don't have to boot Windows and wait for its updates!

[0] https://techbit.ca/2019/02/creating-a-bootable-windows-10-ue...

That seems far more complicated than just using DISM, PowerShell or wimlib (on Linux or Windows) to split the install.wim file into two parts, which I believe older versions of Rufus (or a similar utility) offered to do.

https://wimlib.net/man1/wimsplit.html

Yep, wimlib is the portable magic that makes FAT32/4GB a non-issue.

It is still annoying to have to use Windows to run NTLite. ;)

https://evanshortiss.com/create-a-windows-install-usb-via-ma...

Or use ventoy and never worry about large files again.

I'm as big a Rufus fan as anyone, but for Windows 10 why wouldn't I just use Microsoft's boot image creator?

That's what I've done lately, and it works every time with no fuss.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Edit: I just remembered that you might not be on a Windows device, in which case you may well want to download the ISO and use Rufus to make a bootable stick from it.

I have used Rufus from Macs (my primary work devices) to create bootable Windows installers on USB to reinstall my gaming PCs plenty of times :)

If you‘re under Windows and want any stick, use Rufus. If you‘re under Linux (or Mac) and have an Iso, use dd.

At least that‘s how I do it.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I remember dd not working for Windows images. Did you test that recently?

Some SO user mention it seems to work with dd, however I did not test that recently. Most comments seem to mention that it‘s more difficult than dd.

[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/598632

Normally, for UEFI boot, you could be able just to create a FAT32 partition and copy the ISO content there. In the past, it was perfectly workable way to do so.

Except for the unfortunate install.wim file. The first releases of Windows 10 were fine, they had it under 4GB, but some of the half-year releases have it grown over 4GB, and FAT32 cannot handle that. Thus all the mitigations you see here.

The Microsoft's USB tool does not use install.wim; it contains install.esd instead. It is basically the same thing, but with different compression, so it is still a bit under 4GB. You can recompress install.wim into install.esd, if you have the inclination ...and a windows machine nearby (dism /export-image).

WoeUSB is what you have to use on Linux to create a bootable Windows thumbdrive, dd only works for isohybrid images, and Windows isn't one.

WoeUSB hasn't been very reliable for me. I've had better results booting up a Windows VM to use Rufus with USB passthrough to the drive instead.

I'm love/hating this idea because now I want to burn a LiveUSB running Linux with a QEMU Windows VM already set up on it. I can run it live and have Windows 10 "PE" or I can install it to a host and have Windows up and running fairly smoothly without going through the OOBE.

IIRC you used to be able to make a bootable Windows stick on Linux simply by extracting the contents of the ISO onto a USB stick and marking it bootable. Is that still possible now that EFI is everywhere?

The official Windows media creation tool is a bit of an abomination. Primarily because it is slow and has very quirky requirements that it doesn't advertise and only checks for at the very last second.

You download the tool and want to create a Windows 10 bootable USB, so you run the executable.

Then you find out that it won't let you choose where to save the temporary ISO file that it wants to download. It's hardcoded to the C:\ drive which can easily be a small SSD that is already almost full. You grumble a bit, proceed to delete/move some files off of C:\ so that it could download the ISO and then restart the tool.

This time the download finishes successfully, but after the download you get an error because it turns out it wants to extract what it downloaded - and of course hardcoded to the C:\ drive. You moan a bit, proceed to delete/move even more files off of C:\ and restart the tool.

Third time's the charm right? Well after waiting around forever, it has once again downloaded the ISO and this time also extracted it. Then it informs you that it can't actually create the bootable USB stick because it needs to be run as an administrator. You scratch your head in disbelief, wondering why instead of giving you an error message it doesn't just launch a privilege escalation prompt - or at least have the privilege requirement defined in its manifest.

The fourth time has to work. You manually run it as administrator, it re-downloads & re-extracts the ISO, and you still get the error message that it needs to run as an administrator. What is going on? You google for answers and realize that you've found the only Windows app in existence that is not satisfied with mere privilege escalation but instead demands you to be running directly as the administrator.

You log out of your regular user account, log in as the administrator, re-download & re-extract the ISO - and then finally the tool is willing to create the bootable USB.

...

On the other hand it is possible to create the Windows 10 bootable USB with just the command line [1] and this can be done without having the ISO on your C:\ drive, without having to extract the ISO files to a temporary location before being copied to the USB, or having to directly log in as administrator. A simple escalated privilege command prompt will do just fine.

Thus I'm left wondering what is going on at Microsoft. Did they assign some random intern to create the Windows 10 installation media tool? It is very incompetently made.

[1] https://davidzych.com/install-windows-10-from-a-usb-flash-dr...

Thus I'm left wondering what is going on at Microsoft. Did they assign some random intern to create the Windows 10 installation media tool? It is very incompetently made.

I get the same feeling with a lot of other things in Win10 (which I'm only using because I'm forced to). IMHO it's a sign of the shift to a metrics-driven culture, where the "unquantifiable" parts of quality are being completely ignored in favour of bettering numerical ones. Microsoft isn't the only one, this seems to be happening industry-wide.

It's pretty terrible.

If you go to the Windows 10 download page, you can trick it into giving you the ISO by changing your responsive view mode in dev tools to an iPad or something and refreshing the page. Then burn with Rufus.

Rufus is vastly more reliable, flexible, and orders of magnitude faster.

So long as you enable updates (to enable online functionality), the "SELECT" button has a dropdown to change it to "DOWNLOAD".

Click "DOWNLOAD", it walks you through a script ("Fido") that grabs the latest Windows 10 ISO (and lets you download it directly or using a browser). You can then use that ISO to make your bootable USB.

Rufus does in fact have a long explanation of this on their FAQ:

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#blah-uefi-blah-fat...

You probably left Secure Boot on. That prevents loading the NTFS UEFI driver.

I think I did that, then have problems with the windows installer. A driver prompt. I regularly have to give services to laptops, so I prefer options that "just works". This is also the reason I don't usually use the Windows installation media creator, because is slow and won't burn my several ISOs. There was a time the new Win10 iso installation process would fail on any configuration I would try... I lost somewhat around THREE DAYS trying to solve each f*"** cryptic error message and an old iso did the trick. Just a few hours updating and it was done.

Sadly most of my clients won't just accept the option of installing Linux ;)

I used the same method as you, but from different source.

I tried to dig into my documentation for the link that I saved, it doesn't seem like I saved the google search terms for it, but they can be deduced from the link anyway.

1. https://win10.guru/usb-install-media-with-larger-than-4gb-wi...

Another similar/related project is: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

This is built on top of Ventoy https://gbatemp.net/threads/medicat-usb-a-multiboot-linux-us...

I saw a comment in there about how files will get deleted by over zealous av's when you plug it into a live system, I didn't feel like reading through 60 pages of comments to see if someone solved that issue but I was wondering if you have any suggestions for preventing that.

Delete the tools that are meant to compromise a computer.

If you are the sysadmin, put the target computer in a policy group that doesn't include live scanning temporarily.

There are also USB drives you can get that have a write protection switch, but that doesn't mean you will be allowed to actually run the software.

Reminds of Hiren boot cd

Ventoy is AWESOME. No more continuously formatting your drive for every ISO you want. You just copy your ISOs on and off the drive and they all just work.

Thanks for sharing that is extremely helpful.

Ventoy is great, for a long time I used E2B but lately I've been using ventoy because of it's native support of UEFI, my only complaint is that I find it to be a bit slower on accepting keyboard input compared to E2B. Also E2B has great keyboard shortcut support which ventoy entirely lacks (last I checked)

With the disclaimer than I'm primarily a Linux user and may be missing something from Microsoft, isn't it weird that there are no tools for this functionality that come with Windows? I've tried a few times through the life of Windows 10 to make installer USB drives from inside Win10 with only microsoft tools but never found anything that worked.

Rufus comes through for me again and again, but why do we need to download a 3rd party tool for even basic configs? Nothing fancy, just a windows installer on USB.

It's not weird at all given the target audience of windows. 99.9999% of windows user don't need this, so why include it ?

Because the small percent of users that do need it serve many other Windows users. Seems sorta obvious that SOMEone needs the functionality.

People that have this need have the skill to install the required tool.

That's why we're here talking about Rufus. I'm not sure what you were getting at but thank you for demonstrating my point.

Microsoft provide a fantastic program for creating Windows boot disks that "just works" (Media Creation Tool), and have done so for years.

It doesn't support Linux images, though, for reasons that should be obvious.

Media Creation Tool requires internet access, so you can't just flash a Windows .iso that you have independently downloaded from microsoft.com. Of course, you can always prepare the correct disklabel yourself, use a BOOTSECT.EXE incantation to make the USB bootable, then copy all the files, etc, but this really should be easier than that.

Are you sure about that? I distinctly remember using .isos with Media Creation Tool.

I just tried it and the tool started downloading Windows without giving me an option to select an .iso. It can download .iso's for burning them to DVD's but I don't think it can take dangling .iso's and make installation USBs out of them.

Ahh, fair enough. Thanks for clarifying.

Definitely weird, I installed windows about a month ago and it asked in the tool if I wished to install using an ISO.

Rufus is a light and effective tool when Windows user want to create USB bootable. In the past, I faced some issues about disk partition. The Windows Media Creation Tool usually created MBR partition but my disk was on GPT partition. Rufus did well on creating USB bootable with detail log. No need to type complicated command. No need to copy and edit files. Just select, select and press Start.

Also a Linux user, but back in the Windows days you could use Diskpart to do so:

    select disk ##
    clean
    create partition primary
    active
    format fs=ntfs quick
    assign

Then just extract the disk image to the USB Drive and voila. I just noticed it's even documented on Dell's support page[0]

0: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000136959/create-a-...

I have to say that M$ has screwed up diskpart in some versions of Windows. Sometimes it simply cannot clean the disk correctly after being formatted using some other tools such as Rufus.

That’s not a feature of Windows, but simply how UEFI works.

https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how...

Key quote because my linked article is quite extensive:

> What the firmware will actually do when trying to boot in this way is reasonably simple. The firmware will look through each EFI system partition on the disk in the order they exist on the disk. Within the ESP, it will look for a file with a specific name and location. On an x86-64 PC, it will look for the file \EFI\BOOT\BOOTx64.EFI. What it actually looks for is \EFI\BOOT\BOOT{machine type short-name}.EFI - 'x64' is the "machine type short-name" for x86-64 PCs. The other possibilities are BOOTIA32.EFI (x86-32), BOOTIA64.EFI (Itanium), BOOTARM.EFI (AArch32 - that is, 32-bit ARM) and BOOTAA64.EFI (AArch64 - that is, 64-bit ARM). It will then execute the first qualifying file it finds (obviously, the file needs to be in the executable format defined in the UEFI specification).

Easy2Boot is another good one. Creates USB boot disks with multiple OS ISOs on and boot into any of them. It’s no longer being updated, but still works, just used it this week.

https://www.easy2boot.com/

The only caveat is you need to make sure each ISO is stored on the USB in a contiguous file, since it tricks the host machine into thinking each ISO is separate partition. It includes a .cmd script for doing this on Windows, or on Linux you can use `rsync —preallocate` to copy the ISOs continuously.

Why do you say it's no longer being updated? Looks like he last posted 3/30/21.

He's actually great, when he's online he has a chat option on his website and he'll help you with any questions you have, I somehow screwed up an E2B MBR and he very graciously walked me through fixing it.

Hmm, I could have sworn I saw a comment somewhere on the site that it’s no longer in development, but can’t find it now, maybe I just hallucinated it. Good to know it’s still going then!

This has been my go to for years now. It’s especially useful whenever a friend or family member hits me up with a “computer question” that inevitably leads to “let’s just reinstall whatever you had before” and I just need something quick that works.

How do ordinary people manage bung up their systems so badly that the thing to do is reinstall the whole thing?

And this happens often enough that it’s worth carrying around a tool to do this? I thought that by now systems would be adequately armoured against this.

Usually there is a recovery partition, and Windows 10 has a built-in function for a refresh/reinstall from the recovery partition. No USB drive needed. I did this recently over the phone for a relative's computer, but I forgot the exact name of this feature in the settings/control panel.

In my case, it was necessary because the computer had not been used for months and was unable to connect to various websites, perhaps due to an out-of-date certificate. Rather than troubleshoot the issue, it was easier to just do the refresh.

"Reset this PC" is one possibility that you're thinking of. Has options for saving or deleting all user-dir files, (afaik) always removes installed applications. Can also fully format the disk, and pull a clean copy of the installer from the 'net.

Within the last year on the same system I've had both windows 10 and a linux install commit suicide via update with no particularly special conditions. I later figured out what happened with the linux system only after some frustration and paving over it. It was a defect in a distro provided config file that resulted in the initramfs not having the proper support for the filesystem.

With windows no automated repair could fix it and the whole system is so opaque that I will probably never know what happened other than it works after reinstall.

Even if nothing ever goes wrong you will eventually need to install to a new system and usb drives are incredibly cheap with a 64GB USB 3.1 weighing in at all of $8-$12. You needn't carry it around just stick it in a desk drawer.

A non-representative, non-ordinary example.

I ran distro upgrade on Fedora and it destroyed my grub. This is unusual, I ran several distro upgrades without issues, but this time it was different.

I am no expert on grub and after spending 20 minutes trying out various solutions from the Internet I gave up and ran a quick reinstall. At least most of it was unattended and I had a clean system as a result.

Rufus is really neat. However, for writing distro images, the dd command is my favorite. Per the Arch Wiki:

dd bs=4M if=path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdx conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

Lazy mode:

# <image.iso >/dev/sdx; sync

this is a zsh-ism. on bash it will have no effect.

TIL. Thanks for the pointer!

Rufus is great for writing Windows ISOs to thumb drives. Sometimes it tries to be too smart though. In particular I had trouble writing a SmartOS disk image successfully.

I tried writing something[1] that would be a little smarter than Win32 Disk Imager. That is, it will adjust EFI partition labeling. Otherwise it will just write the image. After some experimentation that is what was needed to get a SmartOS disk image to boot on my old laptop.

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but you can’t use something like dd to write invalid disk partitioning data and expect it to boot. EFI expects there to be a header at the beginning and end of the disk. Furthermore, I can’t try to “optimize” my disk image writer by skipping zeroed sectors and expect everything to work out fine. Without knowledge of the file system format, leaving sectors uncleared causes all kinds of fun data corruption.

[1]: https://github.com/AustinWise/SimpleDiskImager

I have always used Etcher[0] and I love it.

[0] https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Nice, how does the reliability compare to unetbootin ?

I get great mileage out of Etcher but I need Rufus to make a USB boot to Windows install.

I tried this once but was annoyed at it being an Electron app, and sure enough it has analytics that spy on your usage by default including "information about the type of SD cards and USB drives": https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/more/collected-data/#balena...

Then flash it on an OS that's not connected to the Internet? That's what I do anyway. For some that's a pain, but over time I learned to have an OS that's airgapped for privacy reasons.

Obviously it’s not the end of the world for technical people who are in the habit of looking inside all new applications’ settings and reading their privacy policies, but it means I could never recommend this app to anyone in good conscience knowing they will probably skip all of that and get spied on.

Etcher is easy to use but why on earth did they decide to make it an electron app?

Portability, RUFUS is windows only, most other tools require a lot more work to port. this one appears to be installable/usable on Win/Mac/Linux

Personally I'm a fan of ventoy[0] though it doesn't appear to be installable on mac, but if you set it up on linux/windows you can just drop any iso you want onto it from any system and it'll work like a charm.

[0] https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy

I can't imagine electron is more compete than a wine wrapper around a native windows app. Qt or similar gui shouldn't be too much work for what appears to be a single window app.

I love that something that basically clones what "dd" can do is ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FOUR MEGABYTES. And people just accept that as normal. dd is 76k

Imagine if the binary is 128MB how big the source code repo must be.

I'll take a GUI that helps me triple-check I'm not dd-ing my root volume

Unfortunately, etcher has a long history of privacy violations which I find completely unacceptable (especially for an open source project!) https://forums.balena.io/t/serious-privacy-concerns-with-etc...

As in, even when I turned off 'report usage statistics', it kept making outbound network connections. That was it for me... trust lost; uninstalled immediately.

I prefer Etcher over Rufus because there's very little to configure. It's easy to get the settings wrong in Rufus and it can make an ISO unbootable or unusable if you don't know what you're doing.

DriveDroid (https://www.drivedroid.io) is pretty good for this sorta thing

I've had issues with most bootable USB creation tools, including Rufus, particularly with CentOS (even though it's listed as known working!). I'm not sure whose fault this is, really. I think the problem is that the tools just try to be too "smart" instead of simply dd-ing the bytes over. The best tool I've found for this on Windows is Rawrite32.

Rufus has issues with some early UEFI implementations and may not work at all. I haven't had a problem with current hardware, however.

The early UEFI days were just a headache for everyone involved, really.

Same, although unetbootin in has been the most reliable for me.

In case others have the same question I did:

Only supports Windows, no Linux or macOS support planned.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#do-you-plan-to-por...

EDIT: running on, not creation of boot volumes for

You shouldn't need it on linux because you can just use dd

or cp ...

  cp my.iso /dev/sdc

The Debian manual agrees to use `cp` and then to run `sync` to make sure all data is really written to the disk. I've been doing this for a year or two now with no issues, even from a Mac.

I recently had to create a bootable USB drive, and tried following the instructions on the Arch wiki[1] to just use coreutils:

  # cat path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso > /dev/sdx
      or
  # dd bs=4M if=path/to/archlinux-version-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdx conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

However, this was ridiculously slow. I waited a long time for cat, but not long enough to figure out if it would ever finish. dd reported speeds of less than half a MB/s, gnome-disk-utility was about eight times faster.

I wonder if a different set of options to dd would have given better results. From what I can tell, gnome-disk-utility is just open() and write() (with suitable flags) in the end.

1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB_flash_installation_medi...

You sometimes have to use a bit of guesswork to find the best `bs` value, 8M is usually faster IME. I think gnome-disk benchmarks it?

Now, you could also do without fsync, and call `sync` at the end, it could be faster.

I like the idea of bootable usb, but 9 times out of 10 it's easier for me to do a PXE boot to an iso. I have a linux computer setup to provide the PXE boot stuff in my lab.

I used to have a vmware player image that would run pxe boot on a 2nd nic I put in my laptop (USB), but it's been awhile since I've needed to do that.

PXE is great but it needs infrstructure that I usually do not have available. I use netinstall from grub instead.

For Linux usb writing from Windows, I have had great success for many years with Lili https://www.linuxliveusb.com/

Been using Rufus about 13 times today, it gets the job done. I like it

Unless you're trying to flash some decade old operating system 'dd' should do the job. I haven't seen a non hybrid iso in years.

Rufus has been my go-to for maybe decades now? It's one of those software that I keep a copy of in cold storage for the apocalypse.

For anyone complaining that there is no nice GUI for dd on Linux and macOS, I recently discovered Fedora Media Writer [1] which works great for this job. Despite it’s name, it can be used with any ISO just like dd.

[1] https://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter

I have been running https://netboot.xyz/ from a docker container for years and don't look back. I even set it up to have local copies of the distros I most install, so it picks it up from a local server instead of downloading a fresh copy each time.

In my experience, nowadays just format as FAT32 and copy all files is fine for most situation, thanks to UEFI.

Rufus also has the nifty and often overlooked ability to create VHD images from drives.

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#Saving_an_existing...

From personal experience, Rufus is an excellent project with a responsive and helpful owner/maintainer.

I once had an issue using it with a certain computer + SD card adapter combination. I posted some logs and they responded within a few days with a fix. Thank you pbatard!

Lately all my usb thumb drives have been overheating when using any tool so last time I ended up using an external hard drive after burning through a number of thumb drives.

Anyone has an idea how to artificially limit write speed besides running it over a USB 1 hub?

This happened to me until I bought a $35 Samsung usb-c drive that’s got a metal enclosure. Stopped overheating.

Just used it today due to Microsoft removing their Windows USB utility. Lifesaver.

The Windows 10 downloader makes a bootable USB as an option. Certainly not useful for early versions of Windows, but works fine for W10.

I had a big problem with it last week when creating a 20H2 installation USB, it created a FAT32 disk instead of a NTFS disk.

Unfortunately install.wim on that image is bigger than the FAT32 max file size. Meaning that while the USB booted in the system, the installation was not possible.

Of course the installer doesn’t keep the disk image it downloads to make the usb, so it’s another 5-6G download to try again - this may be problematic for people on limited bandwidth connections.

Personally I just created an NTFS partition on my USB drive and copied the contents of another windows iso over to it.

Note: it's Windows only.

Rufus has only ever given me a problem once....It failed to format tails on a cruzer micro.

Anytime that USB drive was stuck in a computer on boot it would be able to half boot tails.

I ended up having to use dd to wipe it and all was good.

Rufus is so good. If you have your ISO downloaded and your media plugged in, it takes 6 clicks and 10 seconds to start writing to the bootable device. So easy and simple, and it works with everything.

Does anyone know of a reliable way to install Ubuntu on a USB disk?

(I don't mean Ubuntu Live, I'm talking about a full-fledged install which works on BIOSes that are picky about things like EFI).

I used Rufus for the longest time until I moved to Balena Etcher. IMO Its a better utility.

why is creating a bootable USB stick so hard? By the look of the comments it's not something that tools can do reliably. How can I learn more about these types of issues? Booting an OS in general, that is.

more recent Rufus discussion from a posting only 5 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341341

I enjoyed reading the FAQ tonight, thanks for sharing this.

what's the equivalent (especially handling bios and uefi and stuff) on linux for it? i would be really interested.

same tools really ... stuff like syslinux is included, and for "flashing" you could just use dd.

And it's also worth noting that eg. Debian has been providing hybrid images for years. Hybrid meaning you can write them directly to block device like USB drive or burn on CD. They exploit the fact that ISO images have first blocks empty and unused so you can put a classic MBR boot loader there.

Surprisingly there isn't, though a port is often requested. (Nevertheless there're similar tools with either too many or less/none options.) But considering what it offers can be attained with dd+mkfs maybe a Rufus-like program can be hacked with aforementioned tools, some bash, and yad...

Rufus is nice and all, but these days I want a dozen different OS installs and live cds on not-a-dozen thumb drives. YUMI is my one-stop shop.

yup. a staple for the toolkit.

balena etcher is also nice and easy https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Do not use Rufus to make Windows 10 install media. Rufus sucks for this purpose. It uses a weird partition scheme and custom bootloader that doesn't work with secure boot.

You don't need any of this shit. Partition the drive as NTFS, mark the partition as active through Disk Management, and simply copy and paste the contents of the iso into the drive.

For maximum compatibility, just use FAT32 instead of NTFS. The official images will fit in a FAT32 volume. If you have a custom image that's more than the 4GB max file size of FAT32, and your device doesn't support ntfs or exfat, then you can use a single command to split the wim file into multiple chunks as explained here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

> Rufus sucks for this purpose. It uses a weird partition scheme and custom bootloader that doesn't work with secure boot.

Rufus also tends to format the drive strangely for *nix ISO files also. Last time I used it the write operation failed and I was stuck spending more time than necessary repairing the drive's partitions just to make it visible to my machine again. What compounds this is the documentation which can only be described as condescending and hostile.

If memory serves, there's a section in the documentation's FAQ where the author spends a paragraph first telling you that it's good your having problems with your USB drive since it will teach you a lesson. I can never understand why some documentation writers feel the need to take digs at their users. Very odd.

> The official images will fit in a FAT32 volume.

Some official Windows 10 images, as of a few years ago, no longer fit on FAT32 volumes and need to be split. The official Microsoft tool does not work on Linux, so I use WoeUSB for that, which in my experience has worked fine with Secure Boot.

For simple windows installation isn't official Microsoft Media Creation Tool enough anyways? Rufus is a great tool to install ESXi, linux variants and other custom ISOs.

for some reason I can never get the media creation tool to work, it always downloads the ISO and then fails to write it to the USB with some ridiculously vague error code.

rufus on the other hand always works without issue

Weird, for me Etcher doesn't make proper Windows bootables, and Rufus works flawlessly.

I think this was the tool that was happily reporting copying my files over to a USB stick despite there being copying errors (for which it didn't check, apparently).

Left me puzzled with regard to why copying over a new image still led to the older one booting for a while.

Switching to a different USB slot (2 VS 3) solved it, iirc (and I think I never used Rufus again).

It’s weird that it’s 2021 and when I have to go do a bare metal OS install I still make sure I have a DVD burner/drive because I can’t 100% rely on installing from USB.

Why can't you rely on installing ftom USB. It is many years, and many baremetal installs, since I had had access to a DVD drive. Curious about what kind of issues you are having with installing ftom USB

I can 2nd that. Maybe its just that I buy low quality USB drives, but I sometimes have go through the process a few times with different drives before getting one that actually works.

Its a lot less hit or miss with Windows ISOs, but Linux ones can be VERY finicky.

People downvoted me but this was kind of my point. USB drives do usually work, but I still have experiences however rare, that a particular server and USB combination is not working so when there are situations that I have to travel somewhere and be 100% certain that an OS install is going to be possible I still feel the need to have an optical drive.

Any new system I’ve used since about 2011 has been able to boot reliably from USB. The only issues really come down to how the thumb drive is prepared.

Usually `dd` is good enough for Linux/Unix disk images, and preparing an exFAT/NTFS thumb drive (your mileage may vary on whether exFAT is supported on your system) and copying the contents over with `rsync` works good for windows 7+ images

I find it amusing if not a bit sad that the best utility for making bootable Linux flash drives is currently on Windows instead of Linux. The current state of making bootable USB drives on linux is actually quite crappy. UNetbootin used to be a good option but has stopped working on a lot of distros. Etcher.io worked great for a while, but has also stopped working for most situations. The built-in disk image creator in ubuntu flavors works, but only for certain situations.

But at least good ole Rufus works :) Wish we could get something like Rufus (or even better, YUMMI) working perfectly on Linux

What is wrong with just using dd?

To tag on, what's wrong with plain ol' cat or cp?

dd can do seek, skip, re-block. It's unusual to need the features but they exist for good reasons. I used dd to transfer 4.1BSD release tapes to a vax 11/720 via rl02 10meg pack and reconstruct the chunks on the receive side, long ago.

ddrescue will do this for you automatically to recover from a bad block.

Not everyone is comfortable using the command line or even knows that dd exists.

I know it exists but I don't trust it as most tools say "write in ISO mode (recommended) or dd mode (not recommended)"

probably because on most linux distros provide an image (iso) that can simply be written on any media and boots.

like: cat ubuntu.iso >/dev/sdd

dd if=./ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdd

Or you can go the GUI way, and use for instance gnome-disks to write the image to the disk (which also reduces the chance of writing to the wrong disk; when writing through the command line, I prefer to use the /dev/disk/by-path symlinks for that reason).

> I prefer to use the /dev/disk/by-path symlinks for that reason

That was a neat trick. Thank you for mentioning it.

Right but if you select the wrong /dev device, you just wiped your drive. GUI tools will auto select "the usb one" typically. Also tools like YUMI can make things like a multiboot drive with 50 different linux distros on one drive and set up things like persistent disk space for the ubuntu distributions and can set up WindowsToGo drives. Not sure how to do that with cat / dd.

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