Rufus

• Windows User Experience improvements:
  • Add a "Quality of Life" option, to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft forced nuisances
  • Add a Silent installation option, that automatically, and WITHOUT PROMPT, installs Windows on the first detected disk on the target platform
  • Add an option to copy SkuSiPolicy.p7b to the ESP on installation (please refer to KB5042562 for more info)
  • Add tooltips for all the dialog options
• Add limited support for El-Torito UEFI image extraction (Mostly for Dell BIOS update ISOs)
• Improve error report when the user tries to use an image that resides on the target drive
• Improve the UEFI:NTFS partition label to make the install media more explicit during

• Fix UEFI:NTFS not selecting the proper driver for ARM/ARM64
• Update embedded GRUB to v2.14

• Filter out the new Bitdefender VHDs
• Filter disallowed characters in local account names
• Improve Microsoft Dev Drive detection (#2873, courtesy of @MartinKuschnik)
• Improve the pre-formatting partition cleanup code
• Improve error reporting on ISO extraction issues
• Improve detection of drives with long hardware IDs (typically SSDs) (#2894)
• Improve conflicting process reporting
• Improve support for Nutanix (#2884) and umbrelOS ISOs
• Fix a TOCTOU vulnerability in Fido script execution (CVE-2026-2398, reported by @independent-arg)
• Fix replacement vulnerabilities for diskcopy.dll and oscdimg.exe
• Fix FFU image creation being erroneously invocated, when trying to save an ISO imag

• Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-Alt-D) to toggle between Light and Dark mode (#2814)
• Improve WUE option text relating to the CA 2023 option
• Update Linux SBAT / Microsoft SVN Secure Boot revocation values to latest
• Fix some GRUB/Syslinux download dialogs showing only the 'Close' button (#2813)
• Fix an assert being triggered when using the WUE CA 2023 option on its own (#2815, #2818)
• Fix an application crash on systems that have a failed dynamic disk (#2794)

• Add Dark Mode support (courtesy of @ozone10) (#1453)(#2510)(#2713)
• Add support for creating Windows CA 2023 compatible media (requires a Windows 11 25H2 ISO. For more on this, see this Rufus FAQ entry).
• Add support for saving an existing drive to ISO (UDF only)
• Improve error reporting when saving to VHD/VHDX (with thanks to @Kazkans) (#2779)(#2799)
• Improve persistence support for Linux Mint (#2807)
• Fix UEFI DBX updates being reported in some timezones, even when there are none (#2762)
• Fix a situation where no file system can be selected in ISO mode (#2769)
• Fix a crash when trying to process Windows ISOs with very long paths (#2777)

• 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

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

• 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 a

• 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)<

• 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)

• 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
• Do