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Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#161

Post by artificialLimbs »

Strom wrote: post #135
Stratoscope wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 hardcod…

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#162

Post by ball_of_lint »

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!

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#163

Post by ball_of_lint »

FnuGk wrote: post #58
sam0x17 wrote: 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…

What is wrong with just using dd?

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#164

Post by thinkloop »

mrjin wrote: post #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

> 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!

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#165

Post by GranPC »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #149

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 off…

> 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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#166

Post by sam0x17 »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #163
FnuGk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with just using dd?

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)"

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#167

Post by system2 »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #149

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 off…

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#168

Post by sam0x17 »

hansel_der wrote: post #64
sam0x17 wrote: 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

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.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#169

Post by Bancakes »

throwaway8581 wrote: post #149

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 off…

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

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#170

Post by josteink »

josteink wrote: post #142
RMPR wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

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).

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