New Rufus 4.5 has Windows and Linux improvements, for UEFI, NTFS, MBR, ISO, GRUB

Rufus, which is one of the most popular third-party utilities for creating bootable media, has received the latest update today. The new version, 4.5.2180, is available for download now and is based on the beta that was released earlier this month.

The new version brings runtime UEFI bootloader hash validation using the MD5 (Message Digest 5) algorithm checksum method. The idea is to perform self-verification at each boot rather than after a media creation.

Speaking of UEFI, the UEFI:NTFS generic bootloader, which allows UEFI booting on NTFS or exFAT partitions, has been updated to now always use the NTFS-3G driver. And on the topic of bootloaders, GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) has also received an update.

Besides those, there are fixes related to VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) and VHDX (Virtual Hard Disk v2) file formats including a truncation issue and some error messages. And a workaround for an ISO copy-related bug has also been added.

There are more changes in the new release. The full changelog is given below:

• 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
• Don't display the WUE dialog when a conflicting unattend.xml already exists (#2451)

To download the latest Rufus version 4.5, head over to this Neowin software page or its official GitHub repository.

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