Nowadays, it is very difficult to find a CD / DVD ROM, which is why most people prefer to use a bootable USB drive instead of a CD / DVD for operating system installation or software editing. There are many programs in Windows to help you create bootable USB drives. Even Microsoft has its own tool. Of all the tools available, Rufus, the free and open source application is one of the best. In fact, Rufus is one of the few essential tools every Windows user should have in their software directory. The steps below show how to use Rufus to quickly create a bootable flash drive in Windows.
Note– This tutorial assumes you already have an ISO file. If you don’t have an ISO file, you can download it from the developer site.SourceForgeis the leading trusted repository for such ISO files. Also, make sure that the USB drive you are using is at least 8 GB and does not contain any important data.
Use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive
1.Download Rufusif you haven’t already. Scroll down the page where you can choose the latest updated links or any previous version. Along with the standard installer, Rufus also comes in a portable variant. Download the portable version if you don’t want to install Rufus on your system. In this case, I downloaded the portable version. After downloading the .exe file, install and open Rufus.
You will receive a notification asking if you want to allow Rufus to check for updates online. Click “yes” to continue.
2. Plug in your USB drive and you will immediately see it in the top drop-down menu. When you see the disk, click the “Select” button.
3. In the Browse window menu, find the folder where you saved the ISO file. Select it and click the “Open” button. In this case, since I wanted to create a bootable Linux Lite USB drive, I chose the ISO.
4. (Optional) If necessary, click the small “Verify” icon next to the “Boot Selection” drop-down menu to calculate and view the MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 checksums of the ISO file. This is used to check if the ISO file has previously been tampered with.
Wait a few seconds for the computation to complete. If no red flags appear, the operating system / software version is safe to use on the computer.
5. Select “MBR” from the Partition Scheme drop-down menu and “BIOS or UEFI” from the Target System drop-down menu. If you are trying to use this bootable USB drive on an older system, select the “Add Legacy BIOS fixes” check box in the “Advanced Drive Properties” section.
6. (Optional) You can rename the USB drive using the “Volume Label” field. In addition, in the “Advanced Format Options” section, make sure the “Quick Format” check box is selected. As the name suggests, Quick Format quickly formats the disk bypassing bad sector checking.
7. Click the “Start” button.
8. Depending on the ISO file, Rufus may ask you to download additional files. For example, to create an Ubuntu boot disk, Rufus will ask you to download the latest version of Syslinux. Just click the “Yes” button and Rufus will take care of everything.
9. In the message below, select the recommended “Save in ISO image mode” option and click “OK”. You may also see a disk format warning; click the “OK” button.
10. Right after starting the formatting process, you will get a warning that all data on the device will be destroyed. There is nothing to worry as you can recover your data later, so click OK. If you want to reuse a USB storage drive, follow the steps in this tutorial.
11. As soon as you click the button, Rufus will start creating a bootable USB drive. Depending on your USB drive, it may take a few seconds or minutes to complete the creation process.
12. When finished, you won’t see a completion message, but you will hear a completion tone and the progress bar will turn green.
13. In File Explorer you can check if a new boot disk has been created.
As you can see, creating a bootable USB drive with Rufus is quite easy. No matter how complex your OS / software version is, Rufus will make it a usable drive as long as the drive has enough space. Besides Rufus, there are other tools such as BalenaEtcher, WinToFLash, UNetbootin, and Yumi that also provide the same result.