Rufus 3.17 has now been released.
This is mostly a bugfix release that brings the following improvement:
- Fix MBR not being properly cleared
- Fix commandline hogger not being deleted on exit
- Improve ReFS handling for platforms that support it
- Update UEFI:NTFS to latest and remove Secure Boot notice since this version is Secure Boot signed
- Update Grub4DOS to latest
The first item, which is really what prompted this anticipated release, is needed to fix a regression introduced in 3.16 that could create issues when trying to repartition a drive.
However, what might be of interest to most people is that this new release brings full Secure Boot compatibility to our UEFI:NTFS solution for booting ISOs that contain files that are larger than 4 GB, which is the case of any recent retail (i.e. non MCT) Windows 10 or Windows 11 images.
This means that you should now be able to install Windows 10 or Windows 11 using such an image, without having to disable Secure Boot, since our UEFI:NTFS bootloader as well as its accompanying read-only NTFS driver, have now been signed by Microsoft.
<rant_mode>
I'm just going to point out that this is actually the culmination of about 1 year of hard work, the vast majority of which occurred behind the scenes, that started with our spending two months rewriting a GPLv2 compatible version of a UEFI NTFS driver based on ntfs-3g (thanks to Microsoft having arbitrarily decided that they would not sign anything GPLv3 -- I sure like having to waste time re-inventing the wheel, on account of complete bullshit reasons) and that was peppered with an incredible amount of setbacks and excruciatingly unwarranted delays. So, yeah, when developers tell you they are busy working on other stuff ("You wouldn't know that stuff. It's going to a different signing school in Canada"), it's usually because they are...
Oh and my apologies for the 4 users still using Windows RT (Man what a stupid name... Then again, that's what you expect from a company that also gave you this abomination that is the Secure Boot signing process), but Microsoft's current Secure Boot signing policies leave 32-bit ARM out. So there's no Secure Boot for you. Note that this only affects 32-bit ARM and not 64-bit ARM, so Windows ARM64 is fully supported by Rufus when Secure Boot is enabled.
</rant_mode>