Create a bootable Windows 11 USB installer for both old and new PCs?

Don't use Rufus for creating Windows 11 installer USB though it has earned a reputation it arguably doesn't fully deserve.

The tool works fine in straightforward cases, but it makes a lot of quiet decisions on your behalf — partition scheme, file system, cluster size that can silently produce a USB that boots on one machine and fails on another. For anyone troubleshooting a failed install, Rufus gives you very little to work with because you didn't build it yourself.

The diskpart method, by contrast, forces you to understand every step: how partitions are structured, why FAT32 matters for UEFI, why install.wim needs splitting. That knowledge transfers. If something breaks mid-install on a client's machine at 2 AM, you know exactly what to fix because you know exactly what you built. Rufus users tend to just re-run the tool and hope.

There's also a dependency argument. Rufus requires downloading and trusting a third-party binary, whereas diskpart and DISM ship with every copy of Windows. In enterprise or air-gapped environments, pulling an external tool off GitHub is often not an option. The native method isn't glamorous, but it's always there, always the same, and leaves nothing to a black box.