It identified five system devices, including the USB thumb drive we chose for our bootable disk. Rufus Portable's user interface is small and efficient in layout. The portable version of Rufus comes from PortableApps, which takes exceptional open-source freeware and creates reliable portable versions. It greatly eases the process of making a bootable disk, using a USB-attached storage device, including thumb drives and external HDDs.

But USB-attached storage devices holding gigabytes of data are everywhere. Now optical drives are disappearing, too. Years ago, bootable disks were floppies then came CDs. If the patient's condition is more serious, you might even need a bootable disk to recover your OS, disk, or entire system from the full backup you also made (you did, right?). When your PC won't start, the bootable disk you created in a rare moment of foresight will often let you boot into Safe Mode or System Recovery, where you can fix the problem and reboot normally. Rufus Portable creates a bootable USB drive that can help you recover your system when very bad things happen to it.

Rufus software