Rufus, the widely used utility for creating bootable USB drives, has released a new pre-release update that adds new features and improvements. The latest version introduces support for creating Windows CA 2023–compatible installation media, provided users supply a Windows 11 25H2 ISO, which coincidentally Microsoft released earlier today.
This is an important addition for anyone preparing deployment media for the upcoming compliance requirements that the company announced earlier this year in June.
The update also adds the ability to save an existing drive directly to an ISO file, though this is currently limited to the Universal Disk Format (UDF). The feature is aimed at users who need to preserve the exact structure of a bootable or data drive for archival or replication purposes, such that they need not rely on third-party imaging tools.
Aside from ISO-related changes, the release introduces Dark Mode support. With modern UI preferences like how most people tend to love dark themes and dark mode nowadays on their devices, this change is here to bring UI and UX consistency in such cases.
Error reporting has been improved when saving to Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) or Virtual Hard Disk Extended (VHDX) formats. A timezone-related bug that incorrectly reported Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) DBX updates, even when none were present, has also been corrected.
Another fix addresses a crash triggered when processing Windows ISOs with very long file paths, a bug that affected certain custom or enterprise builds. The full changelog is given below:
- Add Dark Mode support
- Add support for creating Windows CA 2023 compatible media (requires a Windows 11 25H2 ISO)
- Add support for saving an existing drive to ISO (UDF only)
- Improve error reporting when saving to VHD/VHDX
- Fix UEFI DBX updates being reported in some timezones, even when there are none
- Fix a situation where no file system can be selected in ISO mode
- Fix a crash when trying to process Windows ISOs with very long paths
You can get the latest Rufus version, 4.10 beta, from Neowin"s software stories page or from its official GitHub repo.