Rufus is a free utility that can be used to create bootable USB pen drives by burning ISO image to an external drive. It is touted as one of the fastest applications around when creating a USB drive for a Windows or Linux installation. The tool can also be used for running low-level utilities, as well as for flashing firmware from DOS, and will also allow you to work on a machine that doesn’t have an operating system installed. It is a light-weight tool that can run directly from the executable file, which means no installation is required.
We all use USBs and Hard Disks extensively in today’s age, to store all kinds of data. And while we use them, it is sometimes required that we format the USBs or format them and create a bootable drive or Live USBs. There are tons of cases where users have to create a USB installation media from a bootable ISO, which would require a bootable USB drive.
All of these requirements can be fulfilled by a powerful Open Source Software for Windows, called ‘Rufus’. Developed by Pete Betard, this software is highly popular among Windows Users for creating bootable drives. The main reason for that is that it is completely free.
But what if you wished to use Rufus on a Mac Platform? Is there a Rufus for Mac? If you are looking for the answers to these questions, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will be discussing Rufus for Mac and the best alternatives.
Does Rufus Have a Mac Version?
Rufus is primarily a Windows application and currently, it supports 64 or 32 bit Windows XP/7/8/10 only. This means that you can not use Rufus on the normal Mac computers. If you need to run Rufus on a Mac, then it will be imperative for the computer to have a dual boot Windows installed on Mac. However, this is not an easy task at all.
To those in the dark, this simply means that you will need to have a Windows Operating system installed on your Mac computer. However, if you didn’t want to have two operating systems running on the same machine so that you can access Rufus, there are quite a number of alternatives you can use to achieve the same functionalities of Rufus on Mac.
Key Features of Rufus 3.9 Software
The following are the key features of Rufus free download.
- Rufus Format USB flash drives, pen drives, and supports commonly used NTFS, FAT, FAT32, exFAT, ReFS, and UDF file systems.
- It is available as Rufus executable and portable software.
- Rufus portable software is Ready to use.
- No installation required but creates some registry keys in the registry.
- Rufus is available in 39 different languages with an easy and user-friendly interface.
- The advanced option in Rufus includes a check device for bad blocks and can calculate MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256 checksums of the ISO file.
- Rufus is two times faster than UNetbootin USB bootable software, Universal USB Installer, and Microsoft’s official Windows USB/DVD Download Tool.
- Rufus supports DOS bootable USB drive and also creates UEFI or BIOS bootable USB drive and UEFI bootable NTFS
- You can create bootable drives from ISO files of Windows, Linux, Fedora, etc. by using Rufus.