Rufus

Rufus is a small but powerful utility for formatting and creating bootable USB flash drives - USB keys, pendrives, and memory sticks - from a bootable ISO image. It's a standard tool for anyone who needs to install or reinstall an operating system from removable media rather than a DVD.

Common use cases include building USB installation media for Windows or Linux, preparing UEFI bootable drives, working on a system that has no operating system installed at all, flashing a BIOS or other low-level firmware from DOS, or running specialized diagnostic and recovery utilities that need to boot before Windows loads.

Despite its tiny download size, Rufus includes everything needed for these tasks without extra bloat, which is part of why it's become a default recommendation across tech forums and IT support guides whenever someone needs to create bootable media quickly and reliably.