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Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

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Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#141
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

Wow this is super handy!

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#142
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-...

That’s not a feature of Windows, but simply how UEFI works.

https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how...

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#143
post #71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To tag on, what's wrong with plain ol' cat or cp?

dd can do seek, skip, re-block. It's unusual to need the features but they exist for good reasons. I used dd to transfer 4.1BSD release tapes to a vax 11/720 via rl02 10meg pack and reconstruct the chunks on the receive side, long ago.

ddrescue will do this for you automatically to recover from a bad block.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#144
post #18

In case others have the same question I did: Only supports Windows, no Linux or macOS support planned.[1] [1]: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#do-you-plan-to-por... EDIT: running on, not creation of boot volumes for

You shouldn't need it on linux because you can just use dd

or cp ...

  cp my.iso /dev/sdc

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#145
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't need it on linux because you can just use dd

or cp ... cp my.iso /dev/sdc

The Debian manual agrees to use `cp` and then to run `sync` to make sure all data is really written to the disk. I've been doing this for a year or two now with no issues, even from a Mac.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#146
post #21
post #11

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

I tried this once but was annoyed at it being an Electron app, and sure enough it has analytics that spy on your usage by default including "information about the type of SD cards and USB drives": https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/more/collected-data/#balena...

Then flash it on an OS that's not connected to the Internet? That's what I do anyway. For some that's a pain, but over time I learned to have an OS that's airgapped for privacy reasons.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#147
post #11

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

I prefer Etcher over Rufus because there's very little to configure. It's easy to get the settings wrong in Rufus and it can make an ISO unbootable or unusable if you don't know what you're doing.

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#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 official images will fit in a FAT32 volume. If you have a custom image that's more than the 4GB max file size of FAT32, and your device doesn't support ntfs or exfat, then you can use a single command to split the wim file into multiple chunks as explained here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

Re: Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

#150
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the benefit of those who may not know, this has been possible (by way of Grub2) with many Linux distros for a while now without custom software. Typically you just add extra boot arguments that point to the iso and flag that booting from it is desired. Unfortunately the required arguments tend to be poorly documented and quite specific to each distro. This looks like a neat tool that's sidestepping that issue. If…

Assuming you loopback mount the ISO, I think these are the major args... fill in the "..." wherever you see them: # Ubuntu linux .../vmlinuz boot=casper file=.../ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=... initrd ... # Arch linux .../vmlinuz img_dev=... img_loop=... earlymodules=loop initrd ..._ucode.img .../archiso.img # Kali linux ... boot=live components findiso=... # noautomount initrd ... # GParted linux ... boot=live uni…

You can also add toram to copy the entire squashfs root to memory. This way you get better performance, and don't need to keep your USB disk plugged in.
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