Targets Supported

Table of Contents Windows Windows 2000 or earlier Windows XP Windows 2003 BartPE and other WinPE 1.x based ISOs Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Preview Linux Others

Windows

Most recent (XP or later) Windows installation ISOs are supported by Rufus. When creating a bootable USB from such an ISO, the NTFS file system is always used.

Windows 2000 or earlier

Unsupported

Windows XP

Windows XP is supported in Rufus with the following limitations:

• Only XP SP2 and later
• Currently the target machine is expected to have only one HDD
• ISO must have a \i386 directory on the root of the CD

The way Rufus supports XP as well as any WinPE 1.x based installation media (2003, BartPE) is as follows:

1. Rufus searches for a \i386 or \minint directory on the provided ISO with the following files: setupldr.bin, txtsetup.sif and ntdetect.com. If these are not found, the ISO is declared unsupported.
2. txtsetup.sif is parsed to find if the /minint option was provided
3. The USB target is formatted as bootable NTFS and the ISO content is extracted as is.
4. setupldr.bin is copied to the root directory of the USB as bootmgr, and txtsetup.sif as well as ntdetect.com are also copied to root.
5. If /minint is not in use then \txtsetup.sif sees the line SetupSourceDevice = "\device\harddisk1\partition1" added under the [SetupData] section.
6. \bootmgr is patched as follows:

• • If /minint was provided and a \minint exists on the CD, nothing is patched
  • If the CD uses \i386, then \bootmgr is patched to replace \minint\txtsetup.sif and \minint\system32\ with \i386\txtsetup.sif and \i386\system32\ repectively (regardless of whether the /minint option is used or not)
  • If /minint is not in use then the following is also applied:
    • A custom MBR that prompts the user to press for a key to boot from the USB if a bootable HDD is detected and that also masquerades BIOS drives 0x80 (USB) as 0x81 and 0x81 (first bootable HDD) as 0x80 is also installed. For more info about this custom MBR, see https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/tree/master/res/mbr
    • Because of the masquerading above rdisk(0) is replaced with rdisk(1) so that bootmgr/setupldr properly uses the masqueraded USB (seen as 0x81 rather than 0x80) as the source for setup files
    • $WIN_NT$_~BT is also replaced with i386 to have the setup process locate the initial setup files.

Windows 2003

Same limitations as Windows XP, except for SP. Windows 2003 ISOs should work from first release. The detection/patching is the same as for XP with the following addon: if \bootmgr is patched, its CRC check for the 32 bit part is also disabled (0x00002060: 0x74 0x03 → 0xEB 0x1A). We expect the CRC disable patch to work on all version of Windows 2003, but it was only tested on 2003 R2 with SP1.

If your Windows 2003 installation media came as 2 CDs, you should copy the content of the second CD onto the USB after Rufus has finished extracting the first one. Or you can just provide the content of CD2 later on as requested.

BartPE and other WinPE 1.x based ISOs

Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Preview

These platforms should work without special considerations needed.

Linux

Others