Rufus

• 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

• Add workaround for distros that use broken symbolic links as their UEFI bootloaders (such as Mint 21.3)
• Add support for GRUB 2.12
• Fix a crash when saving .ffu images
• Fix UEFI:NTFS partition not being added, in MBR mode, for some Linux ISOs
• Prevent Microsoft Dev Drives from being listed [#2395]
• Improve support for SDXC card readers
• Improve Large FAT32 formatting by aligning start of data regions to 1 MB (courtesy of Fred) [#2387]

• Add support for symbolic link preservation when NTFS is used
• Add an exception to enforce NTFS for Linux Mint's LMDE
• Add an expert feature to restrict a Windows installation to S Mode
• Fix persistence support for Debian 12 in BIOS mode
• Fix a regression that prevented the opening of .vhd images (#2309)
• Update UEFI:NTFS to report a more explicit error on bootmgr security issues
• Improve the search for conflicting processes, by running it in a background thread
• Improve support for Slax Linux (#2336)

• Add detection and warning for UEFI revoked bootloaders (including ones revoked through SkuSiPolicy.p7b) (#2244)
• Add ZIP64 support, to extract .zip images that are larger than 4 GB (#2264)
• Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed VHDX image
• Add saving and restoring current drive to/from compressed FFU (Full Flash Update) image [EXPERIMENTAL]
• Fix a crash when trying to open Windows ISOs, with the MinGW compiled x86 32-bit version (#2272)
• Fix an issue where ISOs that contain a boot image with an EFI label are not detected as bootable (#2288)
• Increase the ISO → ESP limit for Debian 12 netinst images
• Ensure that the main partition size is aligned to the cluster size<

• Add timeouts on enumeration queries that may stall on some systems
• Restore MS-DOS drive creation through the download of binaries from Microsoft
• Update the log button icon
• Fix UEFI:NTFS incompatibility with Windows Dev Kit 2023 platform (pbatard/uefi-ntfs#37)
• Fix more GRUB out of range pointer errors with Ubuntu/Fedora when booting in BIOS mode

• Fix persistent partition not working with Ubuntu 23.04 (#2231)
• Fix out of range pointer error with Ubuntu 23.04 when booting in BIOS mode (#2233)
• Fix boot freeze with Ubuntu Studio when Secure Boot is enabled (#2210)
• Fix incorrect architecture detection when checking for updates
• Fix a Windows Store application crash when processing GRUB bootloaders
• Fix a Windows Store application crash when enumerating processes that contain a % sign
• Fix a Windows Store application crash when using German localization
• Note that the major version was bumped on account of:
  • New versions of Rufus requiring Windows 8 or later
  • New versions of Rufus defaulting to a 64-bit executable
  • Old versions of Rufus potentially not being able to update pro

• Add SHA-1 and SHA-256 x86 acceleration on CPUs that support it (#2090, courtesy of Jeffrey Walton)
• Add an option to disable BitLocker device encryption in the Windows User Experience dialog (#2121)
• Add a cheat mode (Ctrl-P) to preserve the log between sessions
• Fix potential media creation errors by forcing the unmount of stale .wim images (#2199)
• Fix potential access errors in ISO → ESP mode by forcing Large FAT32 formatting
• Fix user-specified label not being preserved on error/cancel
• Fix some large SSD devices being listed by default (#2164)
• Fix processing of Rock Ridge CE fields
• Work around the use of Rock Ridge symbolic links for Linux firmware packages (Debian)
• Rem