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Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#61
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#62
post #38
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

Or use ventoy and never worry about large files again.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#63
post #11

I have always used Etcher[0] and I love it. [0] https://www.balena.io/etcher/

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#64
post #54

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…

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

or

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#65
post #37

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.

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#66
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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#69
post #40
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-...

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.
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