Using Rufus to Create Bootable Media

[Music] hello welcome to how to do computers i'm mike and today we'll be going over one of my favorite tools rufus rufus's main function is to create bootable media by burning an image file usually a dot iso or img file to a usb device like a flash drive there are numerous other programs that do this but rufus is by far my personal favorite due to its speed ease of use ongoing development and open source code base rufus can be downloaded at its main site rufus.ie i'll make sure to drop a link to the site below there are two versions a quote regular version and a portable version technically they're both portable as neither requires an installation the main difference per the site's faq is that the portable version creates a dot ini file to save the settings by default and the regular version does not they both run from the directory which they are placed let's go ahead and download the portable version and open it up so up here you can select the target device to write the image to it's detected the usb drive we already have plugged in but you might notice if you have an external hard drive plugged in that it isn't listed rufus disables by default the ability to write to external drives to prevent you from accidentally erasing data on say a portable drive used for backups this can be disabled by going down here to show advanced drive properties and selecting list usb hard drives we do already have a usb hard drive plugged in and if you go up here you can see that it's now listed keep in mind this is disabled by default for a reason and make sure that if you're writing to an external hard drive you aren't erasing any important data so here we can select an iso image let's go ahead and select ubuntu once that image is selected you can see directly under it a slider that sets what's called a persistent partition size enabling this allows what's called persistent storage on the bootable drive that means that when you boot into the operating system on the drive you can store files and settings without them being erased after boot otherwise the immediate is effectively treated as read only and will not allow you to store things that will last past a reboot this is useful for a portable live operating system that you might want to customize and run strictly on the drive without installing to another hard drive below that down here you'll see the partition scheme you can choose either mbr or gpt i could do an entire video on the difference between the two but to keep it short mbr is an older or legacy standard and gpt is a newer standard depending on your hardware it may allow both or only one of these boot methods i tend to use mbr for most of my boot media as it can usually be booted in either legacy bios mode or uefi mode although some newer hardware is phasing out the use of mbr altogether so you might need to use gpt mode for installation media let's go back up here to select real quick and find a dot img file n-wipe should work if you select a dot img file instead of a dot iso file it will force rufus into what's called dd mode which essentially writes the image to the drive including pre-configured partitions in a one-to-one ratio and therefore removes the ability to change the settings as they're already predetermined by the image dd mode isn't just for img files however and is often required for some images to boot correctly proxmox is an example of one of these if we go up here and select proxmox and then we go to start the writing process we'll be given the option to write in iso image mode or dd mode this is because it's detecting an iso hybrid image which is basically an image with a file system designed to be burned to optical media like a cd or dvd that has been converted to boot from a usb drive most of the time when you're presented with this prompt it's okay to go ahead with iso mode however there are some images that won't boot properly unless you select dd mode in my experience i've had more luck writing proxmox in dd mode so that's what i usually recommend another example here is the image for pfsense if you select it it'll automatically use dd image mode as it's being detected as an iso hybrid that is incompatible with iso mode so you won't be able to change any of the settings now let's go back here and select a windows iso real quick you'll notice that the persistent partition size slider is replaced with a drop down box where you can choose to create a standard windows installer or a windows to go drive the standard installer is meant to install windows to another drive and the windows to go is basically a portable install of windows which is meant to be taken and used between computers much like a live linux distro moving on to format options most of this is pretty straightforward the volume label is where you name the drive that you'll be writing to under file system you'll choose what file system the drive will have and usually this is automatically configured when the image is loaded into rufus as is the cluster size these rarely need to be changed under that is the advanced format options here you can choose whether you want to do a quick format or deselect that option to do a full format the extended label and icon files option allow the use of custom drive icons and longer drive labels and check device for bad blocks will check the drive for errors if necessary i normally leave these three options alone unless i have a specific reason to change them which doesn't come up very often so let's go ahead and burn a proxmox iso here i'll leave everything default and then hit start if you're loading an iso hybrid image you'll select the proper mode remember for proxmox we want to write with dd mode and then hit ok and then it'll warn you one last time that everything on the drive will be destroyed so make sure that any important information on the drive is backed up elsewhere if you hit ok it will begin to write and at the bottom you'll see a progress bar which will show you how far along the image writing process is it can take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes or even longer depending on how large the image file is and what type of usb drive you have when the progress bar is full and says ready that means that the image file has been successfully written to the drive you should now be able to safely remove the drive and plug it into the computer that you would like to install the os on hit the appropriate key to get into the boot settings or go into the bios menu to change the boot order and then boot to the installer or live os that you just burned well that about wraps it up for this video as always thanks for watching if you have any questions feel free to drop them in the comments below and i'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: H2DC - How to do Computers

Views: 23

Keywords: rufus, create bootable media, boot drive, boot from usb, how, guide, h2dc, how to do computers, how 2 do computers, usb boot, proxmox, linux, windows, boot, disk, boot disk, create boot disk, burn iso, boot iso, boot img, img, iso, install os, windows 10 installer, linux installer, bootable usb flash drive, flash drive, boot from flash drive

Id: JlUm_gi7eUE

Length: 6min 49sec (409 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021