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...
Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
91–100 of 208 posts
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#92Well 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
Previous post on Ventoy for some discussion:
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#93Windows 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…
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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#94I 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 repo…
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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#95Well 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
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!
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#97Well 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
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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#98Unless 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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#99I have always used Etcher[0] and I love it. [0] https://www.balena.io/etcher/
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.
Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility
#100Well 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
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.