• Bootable windows 7 flash drive using rufus. How to use Rufus

    Rufus is free utility to create bootable flash drives. Compared to other similar programs, it stands out for its simplicity and ease of use, speed, small size, and the fact that it does not require installation. That is, you can simply carry it with you on a flash drive, using it wherever and whenever you want.

    You can download Rufus on the official website http://rufus.akeo.ie/, where it is presented latest version programs at the moment. Or from the link below:

    Rufus create a bootable USB flash drive for Windows 7

    In order to burn Windows 7 to a flash drive with rufus, the first thing you need to do is find the required .iso image. Rufus is equally well suited for creating boot disk ov of the entire Windows line and any Linux images. List of those operating systems, with which Rufus has been tested, can also be found on the official website.

    Working with Rufus will be approximately the same in Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8, so there is no point in highlighting any differences. There is still only one file that fits equally well on all operating systems Windows family.

    To create a bootable flash drive, you will need a flash drive with a capacity of at least 6 GB. It may work with a four gigabyte one, but starting from 6 GB you can be sure that there will be no difficulties associated with the size of the flash drive, so it’s better to take just that one.

    Insert the flash drive into the USB port and run Rufus as administrator. A window like this should appear:

    Look at what letter it is designated in the “My Computer” menu and select the appropriate letter in the box. Most often, Rufus will detect the flash drive on its own, but maybe you have more than one flash drive inserted or the program will make a mistake, so it’s better to check this moment. By the way, if the flash drive was previously used as a boot drive, it may be identified as a CD-ROM (see screenshot). This is completely normal and there is no need to worry about it.

    The next line – “Partition scheme and system interface type” – can be left untouched. The default value entered there is universal and will fit most computers.

    The default is NTFS, and it is better to leave it that way. Fat32 is intended for media with a memory of no more than 4GB, UDF is for recording discs, and exFat is for memory cards.

    Rufus will select the cluster size itself, depending on the file system you have chosen.

    In the “New volume label” field, you can enter the desired name for the future bootable flash drive.

    In the “Format Options” block, you can leave everything as it is, without checking any additional boxes or removing those already checked. But if your flash drive is already old and you suspect that it may have errors, it is wise to check it for bad blocks before formatting, just in case.

    Well, that’s it, all you have to do is press the “Start” button and wait until bootable Windows 7 will be written to the flash drive.

    The resulting flash drive can be used as a bootable one. To do this, you need to either set the boot priority from a USB drive in the BIOS, or press F8 or F11 during boot to call boot menu, in which to select your flash drive.

    Rufus is very comfortable and simple program, which, despite its small size, has all the necessary functions. Making a bootable Windows 7 USB flash drive using Rufus is very simple, isn’t it?

    The free Rufus program is designed to create bootable USB drives (bootable flash drives). An operating system image recorded using the Rufus program can be used to install an operating system on a computer, restore the system, and perform other tasks.

    The Rufus program runs on the Windows operating system, starting with Windows XP SP2 and higher. According to the program's manufacturer, Rufus creates Bootable USB drives with Windows and Linux is faster than many other well-known utilities that are used for these purposes.

    On the Rufus developer site, you can look at the list of supported ISO image Windows, numerous Linux distributions, and other disk images, various LiveCDs.

    According to the creator of the application, the Rufus utility will be useful in the following cases:

    • Creation Bootable USB drive from bootable ISO image(Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.);
    • the need to work on computers that do not have an installed OS;
    • you need to flash the BIOS or make another firmware from DOS;
    • you need to run a low-level utility.

    There are two versions of the program available for download: regular and portable (Rufus Portable). There is no difference between them, except that the settings regular version programs will be recorded in system registry, and after closing the portable version of the utility, the settings file will be saved next to it.

    Therefore for more convenient use portable version of the program, it would be better to create special folder Rufus Portable, where you should place the file for the portable version of the Rufus program so that the application settings are in the same folder with executable file utilities.

    When using the regular version of the program, if necessary, application keys from the registry can be deleted using the keyboard shortcut “Alt” + “R”.

    You can download the Rufus program from the official website of the developer.

    Rufus download

    The Rufus program does not require installation on your computer; it can be run from any drive on your computer. To start the program, you need to click on the executable “exe” file.

    Starting with version Rufus 3, the program’s interface and settings have changed, so I’ve added a review to the article new version applications.

    Main differences between Rufus 3 and Rufus 2:

    • The program interface has been changed.
    • Disabled Windows support XP and Windows Vista.
    • Added support for UEFI:NTFS mode for ARM64.
    • Changes have been made to various program parameters.

    The article first contains a review of Rufus 3, and then a review previous version Rufus 2, which can also be used on a computer.

    Bootable USB flash drive in Rufus 3

    Launch the Rufus program on your computer. The Rufus 3 program window has two sections: “Disk Properties” and “Format Options”.

    In the "Disk Properties" section, you can configure the creation parameters bootable flash drive.

    In the “Device” option, the USB drive connected to the PC is automatically detected.

    Click on the "Select" button, select Windows image to create a bootable USB flash drive.

    In the “Image Options” setting, leave “ Standard installation Windows". There is also a “WindowsToGo” item for creating a special flash drive from which you can run Windows.

    In the “Partition scheme” parameter, select “GPT” or “MBR”, depending on the layout of the disk on the computer.

    From this parameter depends on the “Target scheme”:

    • For GPT disks, the “UEFI (non-CMS)” scheme is used - the system will boot only in UEFI mode, without Legasy Mode support (BIOS emulation).
    • For MBR disks, the “BIOS (or UEFI-CMS)” scheme is used - in addition to MBR mode, the system can boot in Legasy mode (UEFI emulation) from under UEFI.

    In order for the flash drive to boot on your computer, determine the type hard drive computer. Follow the link to use the disk on your PC.

    Click "Show advanced disk properties" to enable other options. For circuit MBR partitions You can enable the “Use patches for old BIOS"if the flash drive will be used on older computers.

    In the “Format Options” section you can configure the formatting order of the flash drive.

    You can set your own name for the bootable USB flash drive in the “New volume label” field. The choice of file system depends on the disk layout (GPT or MBR) of the computer. Computers with GPT must use the FAT32 file system.

    Click on the "Show advanced formatting options" option. Check the box next to “Check for bad blocks” to make sure that the flash drive was written without errors.

    After completing the settings, click on the “Start” button.

    In the warning window that all information on the flash drive will be deleted, click on the “OK” button.

    After this, the process of creating a bootable USB flash drive will begin. After checking the flash drive (if this option is enabled) and completing the recording, click on the “Close” button.

    Rufus 2 program settings

    After launching the utility, the Rufus program window will open. On the right top corner There is an icon with which you can change the language of the program interface. Since, in at the moment, not connected to the computer USB flash drives, then nothing is displayed in the “Devices” field.

    IN in this case, this is an 8 GB Transcend USB drive. Information about this will be displayed in the “Device” section. If several flash drives are connected to your computer at the same time, then in the “Device” field you will need to select a specific flash drive.

    After this, you can go to the system image recording settings.

    • MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI.
    • MBR for computers with UEFI.
    • GRT for computers with UEFI.

    This different options that Rufus supports: regular BIOS or graphical UEFI interface, MBR and GRT partition options.

    In most cases, the following option will do: MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI. Other options are relevant for modern computers, and even then not for everyone.

    • FAT32 (default);
    • NTFS;
    • exFAT.

    You will need to take into account that if the image of the operating system being recorded is more than 4 GB in size, then you will need to select a file NTFS system. After adding a system image, the Rufus program itself changes the file system to the one that the utility considers necessary for recording this image.

    Leave the Cluster Size field at its default value.

    The New Volume Label field will display the name of the system image. You can replace the standard name of the system image with your own, for example, Windows 10, or something similar. In this case, when you connect the flash drive to the computer, you will immediately understand what exactly is written on this bootable flash drive.

    Under Formatting Options, you can look at " Additional options", by clicking on the arrow button.

    Recording to a USB flash drive Windows To Go

    If your computer has Windows 8 or higher operating system installed, then when writing an image to a USB flash drive Windows systems 7 Enterprise, Windows 8.1 Enterprise, or Windows 10 Enterprise, the Rufus program window will appear special item"Windows To Go"

    If this item is activated, using the Rufus program, you can write to a USB drive special version Windows Enterprise operating system - Windows To Go, which can be launched from a flash drive.

    To do this, you need special large-capacity flash drives, from 32 GB or more. Just keep in mind that not all flash drives are suitable for recording the system to a flash drive. List of some supported USB flash drives can be found on the Microsoft website.

    Portable creation process Windows versions is not simple and does not always complete successfully. According to the program developer, for creating Windows 8.1 To Go, recording the system to a flash drive in the Rufus program, must occur on a computer with the Windows 8.1 operating system installed, this also applies to the Windows 10 operating system.

    After creating a bootable USB flash drive with Windows To Go, you can run this special version of the system from a flash drive on different computers.

    Burning a System Image in Rufus 2

    Next, using the appropriate buttons, you will need to select the image and boot method. Click on the "Download Method" button and select the ISO image. Then, using the next button with the image of a DVD-ROM (optical drive), select the disk image on your computer.

    In the Explorer window that opens, select the desired image systems.

    After completing all the settings in the application, click on the “Start” button.

    Immediately after this, a window will open warning that all data is on USB disk will be destroyed. Click on the “OK” button in this window to continue the process of writing the system image to the USB flash drive.

    Once the process is complete, you can close the Rufus program window.

    Now you can open an Explorer window and see that a bootable USB flash drive, written using the Rufus program, is connected to your computer.

    In this image, you can see that I assigned the flash drive on which the operating system image was written to a clear name: Windows 10 x64. Therefore, after connecting this flash drive to any computer, I will immediately understand that this is a bootable flash drive with a specific operating system.

    After this you can boot from external USB drive for installing the operating system on this computer. Boot image I installed the Windows operating system, created using the Rufus program, on VHD ( Virtual hard disk) on your computer as a second operating system.

    Conclusions of the article

    By using free program Rufus can create a bootable USB flash drive with the Windows or Linux operating system. To install the operating system on your computer, you need to boot onto the PC from an external USB drive.

    Bootable Windows flash drive in Rufus (video)

    For a long time you couldn’t find a useful note about creating a bootable flash drive? There is a program called Rufus, we’ll look at how to use it now - everything else is superfluous. At one time, it was difficult to imagine that bootable flash drives would completely replace their optical counterparts. USB drives have dropped so much in price that they are available to absolutely any user and do not represent an unprecedented luxury. When flash drives were just gaining popularity - create one based on it boot drive it wasn't so easy, you've probably come across notes on the Internet about ways to command line and other difficulties for the average user. Technologies do not stand still, and to write any ISO image to a flash drive, we just need to learn how to use the Rufus program - in my opinion, nothing better has been invented for these tasks and I can’t even imagine what other functionality might be useful to us.

    I want to clarify one point, Rufus is a program for creating a bootable USB flash drive from a ready-made ISO image. To configure such an image yourself is the topic of a whole series of notes and Rufus is not your help here, this application completely different purpose.

    Just recently, a popular and relevant article was published on the blog about how from the official Microsoft website. This image we can slaughter to a flash drive using a monitored program. Look what a chain is being built, we have a legal opportunity to download Windows 10 and you will learn how to make an ISO image from this bootable media for installation - we will look at all this in detail in new articles.

    Please note: let the article, and in general on the blog, mainly describe Windows or Android applications, then to write to a flash drive using Rufus you can write any correct image, be it Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution

    Any free application For Windows, I strongly recommend that you download only from official sites. You never know which version is posted on a third-party resource, or whether it is there at all. The Rufus developers did not add any additional programs like a mail agent or Amigo browser - everything is as clean as possible. Just follow the link below:

    To our delight, the download page on the website is entirely in Russian and it’s quite easy to navigate. We are offered 2 versions of the program to choose from:

    • Rufus is the most common distribution of the program;
    • Rufus Portable - portable version no installation required, download and run.

    There is also a section “Other versions”, but they are of no interest to us. It is interesting that the size of the application is very small and several times smaller than its direct competitors, although the program has much more capabilities and is more stable than its analogues.

    Remember I promised 2 download methods? — you can download the Rufus program from my blog by clicking on the button below. A portable version is included in the archive.

    Dear friends: unfortunately due to false positives antiviruses on useful files suffers this blog, so you have to use a password on the archive - itshnegcom

    Now we have figured out where to get a valuable application, the simplest thing left is to figure out how to work with the Rufus program.

    Rufus: how to use the program

    In fact, everything here is quite simple, the program has only one window and there is nothing special to configure. To be brief, we just need to select the recording medium, decide on the ISO image to be recorded and click “Start” - wait for the recording to finish. The default parameters are quite sufficient for 99% of users, and now we’ll talk to you about each menu item in more detail and try to burn a bootable USB flash drive in practice.

    Features Overview

    Rufus is a project that is constantly developing and acquiring support for new ISO images and increasing its functionality. remember for BIOS firmware maternal Gigabyte boards I've been looking for a clean bootable USB flash drive with MS-DOS for a very long time, and Rufus can create one in a couple of clicks (To activate the mode for creating a flash drive with MS-DOS, the FAT32 file system must be selected)

    All the inscriptions are in Russian - all the points are logical, what else does an inexperienced user need?

    1. We need to select the flash drive from which we plan to create bootable media
    2. MBR for computers with BIOS or UEFI - this is suitable for the vast majority motherboards, usually this parameter is set automatically with the selection of the desired ISO image.
    3. By checking the “Create bootable disk” option, we can select our ISO image (by the way, the ability to add VHD or IMG has now been added)

    The new version of Rufus 2.0 has one very interesting and useful feature, with which you can create not only installation media, but also a Windows To Go flash drive, from which you can boot and work directly from it without installing it on hard drive (apparently Windows PE from many multiboot flash drive builders work on a similar principle)

    If you activate this item, then be prepared for a long wait - in fact, not only will the image be recorded, but it will be installed full Windows to your flash drive. By the way, this function is active only if you run Rufus in Windows 8 and higher, and it does not work with any flash drives - unfortunately, I cannot explain why this is the case.

    Creating a bootable USB flash drive in practice

    Now we will look at step by step process writing the image to a flash drive. If you look into it, it will become clear that this instruction redundant and there is no urgent need for it. Click on the button with the disk image and select the ISO image of the operating system distribution. If you want to make some changes, please do so, but usually they are not required. Just click “Start” and wait for the recording to the flash drive to finish. Usually for recording Windows distribution 10 takes about 5 minutes; in the case of Windows To Go, the process can take significantly longer (as you remember, in fact you do clean install Windows to flash drive)

    After completion, you will have a working bootable USB flash drive from which you can install the operating system on your computer (as it is fashionable to say here - through the BIOS). Please note that all data from the flash drive will be destroyed without the possibility of recovery.

    In this simple way we were able to create a bootable flash drive, but why did Rufus win popular recognition? — we’ll talk about this in the concluding part of the article.

    Why Rufus - what's good about it?

    The most important advantage of Rufus is that it is absolutely free. I know that UltraISO is very often recommended for recording (I used it myself at one time), but this commercial product and it's worth real money. Why should you look for activators and keygens when all this is available in a free alternative?

    If you rely on tests on the official website and my experience, Rufus really writes an image onto a flash drive faster than its competitors, and it won’t be difficult to figure everything out - after all, it’s in Russian.

    P.S. Have you downloaded Rufus and don’t know how to use it? In this article, we analyzed in as much detail as possible all the functionality and advantages of this program, in practice we recorded an ISO image on a flash drive to install Windows from it, what else might we need from it? — I hope I answered all your questions as thoroughly as possible.

    Modern variety software and other tools minimizes the complexity of installing the operating system yourself, without the involvement of specialists. This saves time, money and allows the user to gain experience while working.

    In order to install or reinstall the operating system as quickly as possible, you first need to create a boot disk using special software.

    Rufus is incredibly simple, but very powerful program for recording images on removable media. It will help you write an operating system image onto a flash drive in just a few clicks without errors. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to create a multiboot flash drive, but it can completely burn a simple image.

    1. Computer with installed Windows XP or later versions of the operating system.
    2. Download the Rufus program and run it.
    3. Have on hand a flash drive with enough memory to record the image.
    4. An image of the Windows 7 operating system that needs to be written to a flash drive.

    How to create a bootable USB flash drive with the Windows 7 operating system?

    1. Download and run the Rufus program, it does not require installation.

    2. After starting the program, insert the required flash drive into the computer.

    3. In Rufus, in the drop-down menu for selecting removable media, find your flash drive (if it is not the only one connected removable media.

    2. The following three options are − Partition layout and system interface type, File system And Cluster size leave it as default.

    3. To avoid confusion between filled removable media, you can specify the name of the media on which the operating system image will now be written. You can choose absolutely any name.

    4. The default settings in Rufus fully provide the necessary functionality for recording an image, so in most cases there is no need to change anything in the points below. These settings may be more useful experienced users For fine tuning formatting the media and recording the image, however, for ordinary recording basic settings enough.

    5. Using a special button, select the desired image. To do this, a regular Explorer will open, and the user will simply indicate the storage location of the file and, in fact, the file itself.

    6. The setup is complete. Now the user needs to click the button Start.

    7. You need to confirm the complete destruction of files on removable media during formatting. Be careful not to use media that contains important and unique files!

    8. After confirmation, the media will be formatted, and then the recording of the operating system image will begin. A special indicator will notify you of the progress in real time.

    9. Formatting and burning will take some time depending on the size of the image and the writing speed of the media. After completion, the user will be notified with a corresponding message.

    10. Immediately after recording is completed, the flash drive can be used to install the Windows 7 operating system.

    Rufus is a program for very simple recording of an operating system image to removable media. It is very light, easy to use, and completely Russified. Creating a bootable USB flash drive in Rufus takes minimal time, but produces high-quality results.

    It is noteworthy that this method can also be used to create bootable flash drives of other operating systems. The only difference is in choosing the desired image.

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