The era of CDs and DVDs ended successfully and USB flash drives came to replace them. With their help, you can quickly make them bootable and reinstall an operating system. A bootable USB flash drive is a standard flash drive that has a specific amount of storage that allows you to contain an ISO image file. We use them to install a new operating system on a computer. This is very useful when there is no CD drive on a PC or a laptop. There are two ways to create bootable USB flash drives. The first method is via terminal and the second method is by using a software. The first method is fairly hard for beginners to do. We are going to show you how to do this using a software called Rufus.
The Rufus utility is a very simple, yet reliable software that allows you to create bootable USB flash drives easily. You can download Rufus from its official website or GitHub. Rufus is a portable software and therefore installation is not required. On their official website, you can also find the open-source code and previous versions of the software. Developers of Rufus claim that their software works faster than competitors. To create a bootable USB flash drive, first of all, you have to download the ISO file of the operating system that you want to install. After that, you need to have bootable USB drive creator software like Rufus. Microsoft also offers a USB, however, its functionality is much inferior to the capabilities of Rufus. After preparing, follow the following steps to install an operating system. The following process will delete any data that your USB flash drive has. Therefore, make sure to backup any important data. Also, keep in mind that reinstalling Windows will cause you to lose all of your data on your hard drive partition, therefore make sure to backup anything you need to keep.
- Download the Rufus executable file and run it. As previously mentioned, no installation required.
- In the home screen that opens, in the "Device" column, select the drive that you want to make bootable.
- After that, using the “Choose” button, locate the ISO file of the operating system that you want to install.
- In the "Partition scheme" field, select the format type of the target disk (on which the system will be installed) – MBR (for systems with Legacy / CSM boot) or GPT (for UEFI systems). The settings in the “Target System” section will switch automatically.
- And finally, click on the "Start" button and wait for the process to complete. Rufus will display a message once the process is completed.
- After that, you can eject the USB flash drive from the computer. You also can keep the USB flash drive plugged in and restart your computer to boot from it.