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EricHarvey's avatar
EricHarvey
Copper Contributor
Sep 02, 2024

Rufus for Mac app for creating Windows 11 bootable USB on Mac?

I was gifted a Windows PC and plan to install Windows 11 on it as it is a bare device and no OS comes with currently. When I searched the relevant resources on the web, a lot of suggestions point to ...
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SamuelVaughn's avatar
SamuelVaughn
Copper Contributor
Sep 02, 2024

EricHarvey 

You can't directly run Rufus on Mac because Rufus and the official Windows Media Creation Tool don't work with macOS. However, you can use built-in macOS tools and services to do this.

 

Using the built-in Disk Utility and Terminal:

  1. First, you need to download the Windows 11 ISO file from Microsoft's official website.
  2. Connect a large enough USB flash drive to your Mac.
    Open Disk Utility (located in Applications > Utilities), then format the USB drive to MS-DOS (FAT) and make sure the scheme is set to GUID Partition Map.
  3. Open Terminal (also in the Utilities folder) and use the createinstallmedia or dd command to copy the Windows 11 ISO file to the USB drive.

For example: sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m, making sure to replace the path and disk identifier.

 

4. The if= is followed by the path to your ISO file, and the of= is followed by the path to your USB device. Using the diskutil list command can help you confirm the correct path to the USB device. Note that you need to be especially careful when using the dd command, because if you specify the wrong disk, you may lose data.

 

5. Finish and Verify: Once the dd command is finished, your USB drive should have a fully bootable version of Windows 11.

 

This way, you can create a Windows bootable disk on your Mac, and while you can't run Rufus on mac  directly, the effect is the same. This process may take some time, especially as the dd command copies files, so patience is required.

Hope my answer helps you!

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