Rufus 4.9 [BUGFIX RELEASE]

• Fix downloads from https://rufus.ie no longer working due to recent GitHub server changes
• Fix unofficial Windows ISOs, with single index WIMs, not presenting the WUE dialog

Note: The GitHub issue mentioned above means that NONE of the existing versions of Rufus are able to automatically detect and update to the 4.9 release.
You MUST upgrade to Rufus 4.9 manually, even if you have check for updates enabled in Rufus... 😢

Also from Rufus 4.8:

• Switch to wimlib for all WIM image processing:
  • Greatly speeds up image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
  • Can speed up Windows To Go drive creation (But won't do miracles if you have a crap drive)
  • Might help with Parallels limitations on Mac (But Rufus on Parallels is still unsupported)
  • Enables the splitting of >4GB files with Alt-E (But still WAY SLOWER than using UEFI:NTFS)
• Switch to using Visual Studio binaries everywhere, due to MinGW DLL delay-loading limitations
• Add more exceptions for Linux ISOs that restrict themselves to DD mode (Nobara, openSUSE, ...)
• Improve reporting of UEFI bootloaders in the log, with info on the Secure Boot status
• Fix an issue with size limitations when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same drive
• Fix a crash when opening the log with the 32-bit MinGW compiled version
• Fix commandline parameters not being forwarded to original Windows setup.exe

Rufus 4.8

• Switch to wimlib for all WIM image processing:
  • Greatly speeds up image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
  • Can speed up Windows To Go drive creation (But won't do miracles if you have a crap drive)
  • Might help with Parallels limitations on Mac (But Rufus on Parallels is still unsupported)
  • Enables the splitting of >4GB files with Alt-E (But still WAY SLOWER than using UEFI:NTFS)
• Switch to using Visual Studio binaries everywhere, due to MinGW DLL delay-loading limitations
• Add more exceptions for Linux ISOs that restrict themselves to DD mode (Nobara, openSUSE, ...)
• Improve reporting of UEFI bootloaders in the log, with info on the Secure Boot status
• Fix an issue with size limitations when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same drive
• Fix a crash when opening the log with the 32-bit MinGW compiled version
• Fix commandline parameters not being forwarded to original Windows setup.exe

Rufus 4.8 BETA

• Switch to wimlib for all WIM image processing:
  • Greatly speeds up image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
  • Can speed up Windows To Go drive creation (But won't do miracles if you have a crap drive)
  • Might help with Parallels limitations on Mac (But Rufus on Parallels is still unsupported)
  • Enables the splitting of >4GB files with Alt-E (But still WAY SLOWER than using UEFI:NTFS)
• Switch to using Visual Studio binaries everywhere, due to MinGW DLL delay-loading limitations
• Add more exceptions for Linux ISOs that restrict themselves to DD mode (Nobara, openSUSE, ...)
• Improve reporting of UEFI bootloaders in the log, with info on the Secure Boot status
• Fix an issue with size limitations when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same drive
• Fix a crash when opening the log with the 32-bit MinGW compiled version

Rufus 4.7

• Add a mechanism to detect and download updated DBXs from the official UEFI repository
• Add ztsd compression support for disk images
• Add a new exclusion feature in the settings, to ignore disks with a specific GPT GUID
• Improve detection for compressed VHD images that are too large to fit the target drive
• Fix commandline hogger not being deleted when running Rufus from a different directory
• Fix FAT filenames from embedded images being potentially truncated on image extraction
• Fix a side-loading vulnerability [CVE-2025-26624] with cfgmgr32.dll (with thanks to @EmperialX)
• Fix UI memory leaks (courtesy of @ozone10)
• Fall back to user/system default locale when getting error description (courtesy of @Wack0)
• Don't run the commandline hogger on POSIX shells
• Drop ARM 32-bit builds (Note that ARM 64-bit builds are NOT affected by this)
• Update FreeDOS and Grub4DOS to latest

Rufus 4.6

• Add a new setup.exe wrapper to bypass Windows 11 24H2 in-place upgrade restrictions (#2568)
• Add TimeZone to regional options replication (#2499)
• Set local account passwords to not expire by default
• Fix an error when trying to write compressed VHD images (#2468)
• Fix an error when invoking Rufus from the PowerShell commandline (#2556)
• Improve revoked UEFI bootloaders check to support Linux SBAT, Windows SVN and cert DBX
• Improve support for ReactOS boot media (#2589)

Rufus 4.5

• Add new advanced option to perform runtime UEFI media validation of suitable images (Windows, most Linux)
• Move the Use Rufus MBR advanced option to a cheat mode (Alt-A)
• Fix truncation of VHDX images, as well as a benign error message when writing VHD/VHDX (#2468)
• Fix support for Linux persistence in some configurations (Mint, Ubuntu 24.04)
• Fix multiple potential vulnerabilities (with thanks to Mansour Gashasbi)
• Update internal GRUB to version 2.12
• Update UEFI:NTFS to latest (now always uses the ntfs-3g driver, rather than the buggy AMI NTFS one)
• Increase buffer size when copying ISO files, in an attempt to minimize the AMI NTFS UEFI driver bug
• Improve partition creation handling
• Don't display the WUE dialog when a conflicting unattend.xml already exists (#2451)

Rufus 4.4

• Add workaround for distros that use broken symbolic links as their UEFI bootloaders (such as Mint 21.3)
• Add support for GRUB 2.12
• Fix a crash when saving .ffu images
• Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being added, in MBR mode, for some Linux ISOs
• Prevent Microsoft Dev Drives from being listed [#2395]
• Improve support for SDXC card readers
• Improve Large FAT32 formatting by aligning start of data regions to 1 MB (courtesy of Fred) [#2387]

Rufus 4.3

• Add support for symbolic link preservation when NTFS is used
• Add an exception to enforce NTFS for Linux Mint's LMDE
• Add an expert feature to restrict a Windows installation to S Mode
• Fix persistence support for Debian 12 in BIOS mode
• Fix a regression that prevented the opening of .vhd images (#2309)
• Update UEFI:NTFS to report a more explicit error on bootmgr security issues
• Improve the search for conflicting processes, by running it in a background thread
• Improve support for Slax Linux (#2336)

Rufus 4.2

• Add detection and warning for UEFI revoked bootloaders (including ones revoked through SkuSiPolicy.p7b) (#2244)
• Add ZIP64 support, to extract .zip images that are larger than 4 GB (#2264)
• Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed VHDX image
• Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed FFU (Full Flash Update) image [EXPERIMENTAL]
• Fix a crash when trying to open Windows ISOs, with the MinGW compiled x86 32-bit version (#2272)
• Fix an issue where ISOs that contain a boot image with an EFI label are not detected as bootable (#2288)
• Increase the ISO → ESP limit for Debian 12 netinst images
• Ensure that the main partition size is aligned to the cluster size

Rufus 4.1

• Add timeouts on enumeration queries that may stall on some systems
• Restore MS-DOS drive creation through the download of binaries from Microsoft
• Update the log button icon
• Fix UEFI:NTFS incompatibility with Windows Dev Kit 2023 platform (pbatard/uefi-ntfs#37)
• Fix more GRUB out of range pointer errors with Ubuntu/Fedora when booting in BIOS mode