Rufus explains why the new way to install Windows 11 is currently broken

Rufus is having trouble completing the installations of Windows 11 when using its new silent install method. The app's dev has explained why.

Earlier this week, Rufus received a major update with the final version of 4.14. It's a major update for sure as the new release brings a new way to install Windows 11 with a new silent option, allows you to disable several pre-installed apps and more. Check out the full details in its dedicated piece here.

However, a recently reported bug has been affecting the silent Windows installation feature and Peter Batard, the developer of the tool, confirmed it as he was able to replicate it too.

Affected users report that Windows installations created with Rufus seem to be failing consistently at around 75% completion, thus stopping the setup process before the installation is finished. The issue appears across multiple hardware specifications, indicating it is not limited to certain configurations only.

One of the users, pineapple63, was able to determine that the Autounattend XML file could explain what's going as without the XML file, the installation ran fine with no errors. This gave a clue as to what could be going on as a modified XML was able to get work around the issue.

Batard explained: "... now I am able to replicate the issue if I completely clear the target disk first. My current guess is that if Windows sees a partition it can access there, it might try to map it as D-drive (since it would of course reserve C-drive for the system drive), and because it is already mapped, our own mapping of the USB drive is pushed further down to something Windows is happy with. But Setup sees no partition it can map, our D-drive mapping succeeds, and it seems to throw Setup off for some reason."

This is not the first time that Windows or Microsoft has been blamed for issues on Rufus as something similar had happened back in February too.

He further added: "Interestingly, on a system with a blank disk, and even when not mapping anything to D-drive, you will find that there is a D-drive during the file copy stage, labelled EFI but with no data on it .... So it does indeed look like D-drive is a reserved letter by Setup, and trying to map something to it is asking for trouble... unless it was already automatically mapped by Setup during disk/volume discovery (which will be the case if you happen to reinstall Windows over a previous install... instead of starting with a blank system)."

For now, the Rufus author has devised a test version to see if it's working. If you wish to try it out yourself you can get it from here on GitHub thread discussing the issue. You can also avoid using the silent installation feature as a temporary workaround.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 3 May 2026 at 7:27 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of April) 1,700

RIP Matrix