On Sat, 18 Mar 2023 at 18:12, Aitor Santamaría <aitor...@gmail.com> wrote: > > To those that have used/experience with RUFUS: what is the concept behind it?
Um. I am not sure I understand the question. Either it is a very very simple question, or a very complicated one. Simple answer: Rufus is a Windows tool for making bootable USB keys from ISO images. Complicated answer: An "ISO" is a file containing an image of an optical disk (typically a CD or a DVD). They are so named because the standard cross platform on-disk format for optical media is ISO standard 9660, or ISO9660 for short. DOS and DOS-based OSes couldn't support a 7-character file extension when the format was ratified. To make a bootable USB, you need to write a bootloader onto a USB key followed by the payload of the OS to be booted. Linux and other non-MS OSes usually include this bootloader in the disk image, so you can just bit-copy the ISO file to the raw USB device and it will boot. (This is partly because they use non-FAT-like filesystems so they put a disk image of their native filesystem in the disk image, and a bootloader). Windows ISOs won't, or not always, so you need a tool to install that bootloader and then unpack the OS files into an ISO9660 like FS with long filename extensions. Because the ISO9660 format is close enough to a Windows format, the boot disk doesn't need the fancy virtual filesystem stuff, so paradoxically the disk writing tools need to be smarter because they need to do _more_ work. Rufus is a free tool to do this. It is good and reliably makes bootable USB keys from Windows ISOs, which Linux tools can't always do in my quite extensive experience. However, you need a running Windows system _first_ so it poses a chicken-and-egg problem. To install Windows you need Windows to make the boot media to load Windows. Secondly, Rufus is very _very_ slow. It takes an hour or so. Linux takes 5min to write a typical size of disk image. I regard it as obsolete since I discovered Ventoy. Ventoy does the bootup logic internally, so just format a key with Ventoy and copy ISO files onto it and it generates a boot menu on the fly and boots DOS or Linux or Windows or whatever for you. Ventoy is great and a huge time saver and it just works, so I don't usually use Rufus any more. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
