With the advent of ultra portable laptops, optical drives are becoming
a thing of the past. Although not having optical drives allows
manufacturers to make lighter devices, it causes problems to users
when they want to fresh install operating systems, as most of them are
still available in the form of CDs, DVDs and downloadable ISOs. For
users of these devices, the only option then remains is to use a flash
drive to install the operating system of their choice.
Not surprisingly, there are also a few of us who prefer installing
operating systems from flash drives for its faster speeds. There are
also a few of us who prefer to keep live operating systems on our
flash drives to access computers without having an OS by simply
plugging in our devices.
Bootable USB drives from ISO
With such a lot of users needing to create bootable USB flash drives,
it appears imperative that OS manufacturers provide an inbuilt way to
create them with each DVD and CD they provide. However, that is not
the case with all operating system manufacturers.
In fact, most of the users are left hunting for third party
applications that can create a bootable USB drive for their specific
operating system. To add to a user's misery, the OS manufacturers that
do provide an application for this make them OS specific (like the
Windows 7 USB/DVD tool) and do not support ISOs and DVDs of other OSs.
Some of them fail to work even if the original ISO/DVD is slightly
modified (slipstreamed etc.).
Use Rufus to create bootable USB media
If you too are one such user looking for a solution, you can stop
looking and try Rufus, an open source tool to create a bootable USB
drive from any bootable ISO.
Rufus is small in size (nearly 615 KB) and claims to be faster at
creating bootable USB drives than most applications of its type. Rufus
is also portable which means that you need not install this software
to use it. Just double click on the executable file and the
application will start working. Rufus also allows you to add fixes to
use your bootable flash drives on older computers having BIOSs which
do not support booting from them.
Strangely however, Rufus can only create bootable flash drives from
ISOs meaning you need to have an ISO image of the CD or DVD of the OS
of your choice.
I do not think this should be too much of a problem considering how
easy it is to create ISOs from DVDs and CDs.
How to use Rufus?
1) When you start Rufus, the first option that you will see is
Device:. It contains all your connected USB drives. If you plug in a
USB drive after starting Rufus, the drive you have connected will
shortly be available here.
2) You will not need to modify the Partition Scheme and target system
type, as the default choice is suitable for making the USB drive work
on both UEFI and legacy BIOS computers.
Create Bootable USB drives
Rufus in Windows 8
3) Change the file system from FAT32 to NTFS from the dropdown menu.
This is the file system with which your USB drive will be formatted
with. Do note that older computers will not boot from a flash drive
formatted as NTFS. Do not modify the cluster size. Enter the name you
want for your USB device in the Volume label box.
4) Check the Create a bootable disk using checkbox if it is not
already checked. In the dropdown menu next to it, select ISO image.
Click on the button right to it to locate your ISO image.
Do note that Rufus will format your USB drive deleting everything on
it before making it bootable. So, make sure that it does not contain
any important data.
5) Click on Start to format your USB drive and extract all files of
the ISO to it.
To install the OS, restart your computer and select your USB device as
the primary boot option in the BIOS boot menu.
Compatibility
Rufus works on all the latest versions of Windows and can be used to
extract the following ISOs to a bootable USB drive:-
Arch Linux, Archbang, BartPE/pebuilder, CentOS, Damn Small Linux,
Fedora, FreeDOS, Gentoo, GParted, gNewSense, Hiren's Boot CD, noppix,
KolibriOS, Kubuntu , Linux Mint, OpenSUSE , ReactOS, rEFInd,
Slackware, Tails, Trinity Rescue Kit, Ubuntu, Ultimate Boot CD,
Windows XP (SP2, SP3), Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista, Windows
7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 and many more.
If you face any problem, you can write about it in the comments.
