A Free Tool to Format USB Disks and Create Bootable USB Disks

Rufus is a simple free utility which makes it easy to create bootable USB disks from ISO images. Creating a bootable USB disk might come very handy when you don’t have access to CD/DVD drive in a computer system. When you download some bootable tool like an antivirus repair disc, you’ll often find it comes in the form of an ISO image, which it’s assumed you’ll then burn to CD or DVD. Of course if your target system doesn’t have an CD/DVD drive then that won’t help you very much. Rufus is specially useful for those who do not have any optical drive on their system.

Rufus works with all kinds of USB memory devices like USB pen drives, USB keys, USB hard disks, USB memory cards and so on. 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.

Official Website of Rufus
http://rufus.akeo.ie/
Current version: 1.2.0

System Requirements
Windows XP or later, 32 or 64 bit doesn’t matter.
If elevation is required, you will be prompted for it.

Usage of Rufus
Attach your USB disk to your computer. Visit Rufus website and download Rufus. Then executable and run it – no installation is necessary. The interface 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 automatically selects the first USB drive it finds, you only have to point the program to your ISO file before clicking “Start”. Rufus will format the USB disk and write the ISO image into it. All data on your USB disk will be lost while formatting and creating the bootable USB disk. So please backup your USB disk data before running Rufus.

Please remember that once completed, your bootable USB drive is still usable as before to transfer data: it doesn’t have to be dedicated for DOS or ISO installation only.

Rufus also allows you to check your USB disk for bad blocks. Up to 4 passes can be selected to find out if your USB disk is defected.

The best thing about Rufus is that it’s faster than other tools. I personally use free ImgBurn tool for all my ISO, CD or DVD related requirements. The only thing it lacks is a feature to create a bootable USB disk from a bootable ISO image of a CD or DVD. Everyone can create bootable USB drives easily with Rufus.