We chose to reformat it in NTFS and enable compression. HP USB immediately identified it and its file type, FAT. We moved the data off of an older 1GB flash drive and inserted the drive in an open USB port. Other than Start and Close buttons, that's it, not even a Help file, though this tool is easy enough to figure out without one. This compact tool has an equally compact interface, an efficient little dialog with selections for Device and File system, and an entry field for Volume label, and check boxes for format options, including the ability to create a bootable DOS start-up disk using either internal system files or files at a location you can specify. Hewlett-Packard's USB Disk Storage Format Tool can quickly and thoroughly format virtually any USB flash drive in a wide range of file systems as well as create bootable USB media. You can even boot from flash drives, just like the old floppies, which, together with portability, universal compatibility, and enough space to host useful tools, makes them ideal recovery devices. Also useful is the option to create a log file in case something goes wrong.USB flash drives are this century's floppies, holding everything from personal and medical information to music and pictures and even secure data, with the added advantage of being small and rugged enough for keychain duty. Like with the Windows 7 USB tool, you can choose an ISO image of an OS that you want to copy to the drive. USB sticks are more reliable now than they were a few years ago, but if you bought a super-cheap flash drive, it can’t be wrong to let Rufus check it. The option to check the flash drive for bad blocks is useful. However, for creating a Windows 8 boot media, you won’t need it. If you want to use every bit of your flash drive, you could change that. In most cases, the default cluster size will do. Rufus also supports exFAT, which you can use if you think you will hit the file size limit of FAT32. If you intend to install Windows To Go and use Rufus just to format the flash drive, NTFS is the right choice. NTFS on a USB stick only makes sense anyway if you intend to configure permissions on files and folders. If you have a new computer that supports the BIOS successor UEFI, I recommend choosing the last option if you want to ensure that Windows 8 will make use of the UEFI features.įor the file system, you should select FAT32 and not NTFS in that case. You can choose between the MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI computers, the MBR partition scheme for UEFI computers, and the GPT partition scheme for UEFI computers. Rufus allows you to select the partition scheme and the target system type. Considering that the tool only has to format a flash drive and copy some files to it, I don’t understand why Microsoft requires the Windows 7 USB tool to be installed. In addition, it offers a few features that the IT pro will like.įirst of all, it is a portable application and therefore needs no installation. Thus far, it mastered every flash drive I tried. I think Microsoft should no longer sell Windows on DVDs and instead offer USB setup sticks and bare metal cloud installations.Īnyway, I played with the free Rufus alternative to the Windows 7 USB tool, and it appears to be more reliable. People expect that they can just use a product when they paid for it without the need to fiddle around with diskpart. □ I believe forcing end users to download an unreliable tool to create install media is an anachronism. So you see what a Microsoft fan boy I am. I suppose the majority of customers would just have returned the Windows 8 DVD and bought an iPa(i)d or Android tablet instead. They didn’t know how to do that and I ended up doing it myself in the shop. Since the Windows 8 package only came with a DVD and I didn’t bring a DVD drive, I had to go back to the shop and ask them to create a USB boot stick for me. It appears that, depending on the country, the license key and the Windows 8 setup have to fit together. When I tried to install the OS with my USB stick, the setup complained that the license key doesn’t work. I recently bought Windows 8 in the Philippines. I’d like to take this opportunity to add one more annoyance that might be a bit off topic because I am supposed to review Rufus here. If you run into problems even before you can create the installation media, then then you are likely somewhat prejudiced against a new operating system that was made for tablet PCs and Ultrabooks for which a setup DVD is relatively useless. Considering that more and more PCs no longer feature DVD drives, this could be a major reason why Windows 8 user satisfaction is not always as high as Microsoft hopes.
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