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Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#31

Post by rstat1 »

ToFab123 wrote: post #26
user3939382 wrote: post #19

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#32

Post by AussieWog93 »

madars wrote: post #30
AussieWog93 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#33

Post by eitland »

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?

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#35

Post by BiteCode_dev »

spacemanmatt wrote: post #15
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#36

Post by MarkSweep »

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#37

Post by gumby »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #23

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#38

Post by pxeboot »

sdlion wrote: post #28

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 ye…

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#40

Post by RMPR »

spijdar wrote: post #9

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 downlo…

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-...

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