103 replies to this topic

[Akeo]

Yep, but you wrote this:
https://github.com/p...ufus/issues/759
https://github.com/p...mment-220647442

Which left me with the idea that direct disk access is still possible (even after running that command) .

Surely you do realize the difference between formulating hypotheses as part of an ongoing investigation where you have yet to figure exactly how to address a behaviour you're observing, vs. eliminating said hypotheses as you are zeroing on the most likely explanation.

 

I played a lot with win32diskimager and Rufus initially, and saw some conflicting behaviour there, which I tried to make some sense of. So I jolted down some notes of what might be happening and what I might try next (which I had yet to test). But as one progresses along, and as is expected from the scientific method, some of the earlier statements may find themselves having to be refined, or simply thrown out. So if you hold too much credit to a "let me jolt down some notes before I go to bed" note, I'm going to be very unhappy about having to explain to people that what they see on an issue tracker is obviously a very fluctuating, raw and ongoing deduction process...

 

In other words, whenever you see something that seems contradictory as part of an investigation, it's obviously the concluding/most recent statement that needs to be taken into account.

 

 

As you may also expect, disconnecting and reconnecting the device on the same platform is one of the first thing I tried, but that was to no avail after it had gone through an IOCTL_DISK_CREATE_DISK cycle. Maybe, as you suspect, this is due to Windows keeping a record of the device somewhere, or maybe it's something else. At any rate, I'd encourage people who are interested to play with the steps I provided (that's why I provide them), to try to shed some more light on the issue.

[Akeo]

And Rufus 2.10 has now been released. Please visit https://rufus.akeo.ie for the downloads.

 

The final Changelog is as follows:

• Add SHA-256 validation for downloaded files. You will now see an ✓ or ✗ in the log for relevant content
• Add support for O2Micro PCI-E card readers
• Add compressed NTFS support for UEFI:NTFS
• Improve automatic closure of the Windows default format prompt
• Improve support for Ubuntu (silence a benign warning), Springdale (use the actual label) and Antergos (Syslinux version detection)
• Work around a Windows bug that can render a GPT disk inaccessible after cleanup (e.g. ChromeOS image)
• Fix hash computation for content that isn't a multiple of 64 bytes (NB: This did not affect ISOs)
• Fix Syslinux installation on some media, with huge thanks to 424778940z for the tests
• Fix a corner case where settings could be altered after Start had been pressed, if a hotplug event also occurred
• Additional fixes and improvements

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.11 BETA is now available for testing. Changelog is as follows:

• Do not download BIOS related files unless BIOS boot is selected
• Improve support for Arch Linux derivatives
• Add a cheat mode to disable drive indexing (Alt-Q) on format
• Fix handling of 'Super Floppy Disk' formatted drives
• Fix an issue that enabled FAT32 file system selection on some Windows images
• Fix broken UI font for XP users
• Fix sanitizing of exFAT labels

[Akeo]

There is now BETA 2 here, to add a workaround for USB ↔ SATA controllers that report short writes for >1TB HDDs.

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.11 has been released. Here is the complete Changelog:

• Do not download BIOS related files unless BIOS boot is selected
• Improve support for Arch Linux derivatives
• Add a cheat mode to disable drive indexing (Alt-Q) on format
• Fix handling of 'Super Floppy Disk' formatted drives
• Fix handling of misleading short write reports, for drives larger than 1 TB
• Fix an issue that enabled FAT32 file system selection on some Windows images
• Fix broken UI font for XP users
• Fix sanitizing of exFAT labels

[Akeo]

More features to add, more bugs to fix... you know the drill. It's therefore time for Rufus 2.12 BETA!

• Add Hebrew translation, courtesy of NSBuilder and פלוני אלמוני
• Add a cheat mode (Alt-O) to create an ISO from the first optical media found
• Enable target system selection for Windows To Go
• Enable NTFS selection for Syslinux 6.x (EXPERIMENTAL)
• Fix an issue that allowed BIOS target selection with pure UEFI images
• Fix license display for RTL languages
• Update Grub4DOS and FreeDOS to latest
• Additional fixes and improvements

As usual, if you think that there's something off with the BETA, the issue tracker is at your service.

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.12 has now been released. The Changelog is the same as above.

 

Enjoy!

[Akeo]

Given that the Windows 10 Creators Update is upon us, and that I expect it to break some of Rufus' functionality, it is now time for Rufus 2.13 BETA, which brings the following changes:

• Preserve 'GPT for UEFI' option if the user changed it before selecting an ISO
• Fix unwanted notification sound when closing with the X button (#893)
• Fix inability to restore the minimized application after a popup is displayed (#896)
• Fix an issue when trying to install Syslinux/NTFS twice in a row (#904)
• Work around Microsoft's inconsistent casing of device IDs during device enumeration
• Work around Microsoft's aggressive locking of partitions in Windows 10 Creators Update (#883)
• Restrict write sharing permissions when accessing a device
• Update libcdio to latest

Of note, with regards to the upcoming Windows 10 Creators, which none of the articles listing new functionality seem to be bringing up, is that it looks like this version of Windows will be the first to enable mounting and accessing multiple partitions from the same REMOVABLE drive.

 

As far as I am concerned, this is a very massive change, especially considering how, in the long run, people will have to figure out whether they are using a pre-Creator or post-Creator version of Windows to determine whether they can get their extra removable partitions to show. And I can also very much picture the legions of clueless Windows users, wondering why the heck they suddenly got a whole slew of new drives appear, after plugging something like a Chromium installation flash drive (which seem to have zillions of GPT partitions). Interesting times...

 

Anyway, the download for Rufus 2.13 BETA can be found here.

 

As usual, please don't hesitate to report if you think you found an oddity with this release.

[Wonko the Sane]

And I can also very much picture the legions of clueless Windows users, wondering why the heck they suddenly got a whole slew of new drives appear, after plugging something like a Chromium installation flash drive (which seem to have zillions of GPT partitions). Interesting times...

Interesting times indeed.
The good MS guys must have found some old system where cfadisk.sys was installed and liked it .

About Chromium, to add insult to injury, on USB sticks those zillion partitions (while there alright) will also be empty or just one block in size:
https://www.chromium...rive-partitions
(but what do you expect from someone who use a json file to describe a disk layout?)


Wonko

[steve6375]

They may not be formatted, but they do take up a drive letter in Explorer (my Chrome stick is given two drive letters) - but the drive letters are NOT shown in diskmgmt.msc !!!

It also causes diskmgmt.msc to crash if you remove a Removable USB stick and refresh, and muck about a bit!

It could also mean that we may run out of drive letters if several stick are connected....

[steve6375]

Also, a standard E2B USB Removable drive has a small hidden partition (Type 21). This is now not hidden to Windows and it wants to format it!

If you do format it, it is given a drive letter in Explorer (but not in Diskmgmt.msc!).

Even if you re-fresh or rescan diskmgmt.msc or refresh, the second partition is shown as 'Unallocated' even though it has a drive letter and I can copy files to it in Explorer!

Seems pretty broken to me!

[Akeo]

And Rufus 2.13 has now been released.

 

I would have liked to wait a little longer between BETA and Release, but since Microsoft actually started delivering the Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update) yesterday, for people who really want it, and I'd rather not have Rufus users run into the partition locking issue, I don't think I have a choice.

 

The only difference with the BETA Changelog is that GRUB 2.0 was updated from 2.02~beta3 to 2.02~rc2.

 

You can download the latest version here.

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.15 has been released:

• Fix non-listing of drives that are opened for write access by another process
• Report external processes that may be preventing disk access (in the log)
• Improve Windows To Go support for Windows 10 Creators Update
• Don't report an error on checkdisk failure
• Update GRUB 2.0 and Grub4DOS to latest
• Other fixes and improvements

Enjoy!

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.16 BETA:

• Add an audiovisual cue on completion/error
• Notify user when an ISO is broken or truncated
• Notify user if other processes are accessing the drive before format
• List processes that are locking a drive, if any, on failure
• Improve verbosity of the Windows To Go process

[Akeo]

Had to release a BETA #2, since there were a couple issues reported that I wanted to address (which led to further internal changes that I want to make sure get a chance to be tested on as many environments as possible before release).

 

The only user-visible difference between BETA #1 would be:

• Add a workaround for ISOs using nonstantard Rock Ridge extensions (looking at you Kali Linux!)

As usual, if you try BETA #2 and see something that seems quite off, especially compared to earlier releases, don't be afraid to log an issue to let me know. Thanks!

[Wonko the Sane]

Isn't the Kali Linux's Rock Ridge extensions use fully detailed in the documentation on display (together with the plans)? 

http://www.goodreads...ay-i-eventually

 

 

...ducks ...

 

Wonko

[Akeo]

Well, your comment prompted me to give another stab at doing my best at avoiding having to install Kali Linux, and finding a shortcut to getting the information I want, which, of course, was always in plain sight... at the bottom of the locked filling cabinet in the cellar. I mean, it's not like searching for the exact terms being used to describe the extension, in the place where it is documented, don't give you any single hit in Google and I only found it by chance...

 

Sooo, as I long suspected, this is something that the xorriso people appear to have pulled out of their ass (since anyone who drinks the ISOHybrid kool-aid also appears to be using xorriso these days), and of course they took great care making sure only a limited number of people knew about this new specification that they'd really like everybody to use as if it was part of the official specs. I mean, it's not like they have had 8 years to edit the Wikipedia page for Rock Ridge or something to mention what they were doing...

 

Well, off I go to liaise with libcdio and see whether they consider that these custom extensions should be accepted as something they want to handle...

[Wonko the Sane]

Well, the good xorriso guy :

http://www.msfn.org/...comment=1095938

is seemingly a friendly peep , but - at least at the time, around two years ago - he didn't seem like very "rigorous" in his approach (with no offence intended of course, everyone has to start somewhere).

 

After all these years I have still to understand why genisoimage was written for (let alone xorriso) and why the good people that wrote it (genisoimage) decided to remove one of the most useful feature of mkisofs (embedding in the .iso the command line used to generate it) which was an exceptionally useful tool when needing to recreate a modified .iso, (and of course WHY exactly the good Linux guys adopted at the time genisoimage en masse)

JFYI:

http://reboot.pro/to...ting-iso-files/

http://reboot.pro/to...files/?p=108440

 

 

Wonko

[Akeo]

Hmmm, I wonder if I can make your day with some sweet sweet irony (I'm the person replying to Thomas here):

On 2017.07.25 12:49, Thomas Schmitt wrote:

(...)

> It would be interesting to see the xorriso command line they use

Well, since I was talking about this issue with some other people, who mentioned
this specific item to me, I'll take that as a cue to point out that, from what
they reported, xorriso and genisoimage decided to drop what they considered one
of the most useful feature from mkisofs, which was to store the options being
passed to the commandline application into the ISO itself.

I guess we sure wouldn't mind if that feature had found its way into the new
utilities right now... Maybe something that could be added to xorriso in the
future? ;)

Still, Thomas is a nice guy indeed, and I was wrong when I said the xorriso people were pulling extensions out of... somewhere. What they did should not have been causing issues with software that follows the Rock Ridge specs, as those specs state that unknown extensions should be just be ignored (which they weren't). It also appears that Kali might still be doing some weird/non-compliant stuff on their ISOs, but that's another story.

[Wonko the Sane]

Yep, it seems even too good to be true.

 

Most probably - also in this case - Thomas is perfectly innocent , that mkisofs feature wasn't among the most "reknown" ones, and (as cdob noted in the given thread) some developers (for mysterious reasons) already had the habit to post-edit the built .iso's with mkisofs to remove that piece of info.

 

Thomas has started developing xorriso at a time when (for some other mysterious reasons) genisoimage was largely in use.

 

Just in case, one of the best (IMHO) pieces of humour ever :

Waiter come taste the soup!

http://www.imdb.com/...?item=cz0003114

 

Wonko

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.16 has been released!

 

The final Changelog for this release is as follows:

• Add an audiovisual cue on completion/error
• Add a workaround for ISOs using nonstantard Rock Ridge extensions (looking at you Kali Linux!)
• Notify user when an ISO is broken or truncated
• Notify user if other processes are accessing the drive before format
• List processes that are locking a drive on failure
• Improve verbosity of the Windows To Go process
• Other fixes and improvements

Enjoy!

[Akeo]

Announcing the release of Rufus 2.17:

• Add support for Debian 9 live ISOs in UEFI mode
• Add support for Super Floppy Disk "partitioning" mode
• Add support for more non-USB card readers
• Strengthen download update checks, to prevent attack scenarios that leverage user unawareness
• Fix an issue with Spanish translation prompts not displaying properly
• Fix an issue with Windows To Go support on some non-official Windows ISOs
• Fix an issue with log autoscrolling
• Fix an issue when using A: or B: as drive letters

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.18 BETA:

• Ensure that the same drive is reselected on device refresh
• Add a cheat mode to cycle the USB port of currently selected device
• Make lookup for updatable .cfg file more generic (e.g. ESET SysRescue)
• Fix handling of multiextent ISOs (e.g. BlackArch Linux)
• Fix propagation of image decompression errors

IMPORTANT: THIS WILL BE THE LAST RELEASE TO SUPPORT WINDOWS XP AND WINDOWS VISTA.
FUTURE RUFUS RELEASES WILL *NO LONGER* BE COMPATIBLE WITH THESE PLATFORMS.

[Akeo]

Rufus 2.18 has been released:

• Ensure that the same drive is reselected on device refresh
• Add a cheat mode to cycle the USB port of currently selected device
• Make lookup for updatable .cfg file more generic (e.g. ESET SysRescue)
• Fix handling of multiextent ISOs (e.g. BlackArch Linux)
• Fix propagation of image decompression errors
• Update grub4dos to latest

And again, I am going to point out:

 

THIS IS THE LAST RELEASE TO SUPPORT WINDOWS XP AND WINDOWS VISTA.
FUTURE RUFUS RELEASES WILL NO LONGER BE COMPATIBLE WITH THESE PLATFORMS.

 

Enjoy!

[Akeo]

Well, it's been a long time coming, but at last Rufus 3.0 BETA is here!

 

The most notable change for the upcoming 3.0 version is that it sports a new redesigned UI, which we hope will make it easier to follow the flow of user operations:

 

 

 

I guess I should point out that this new UI redesign is not something we did for the sake of looking for something shiny to add, but because we got countless reports that the old UI was very confusing (for one thing, image selection was way too far down the list of controls), nay daunting for unfamiliar users, and we've pretty much been wanting to improve on this for the past 5 years! I really hope this new modern design, the concept of which we really have to thank Fahad Al-Riyami for, will make Rufus both more intuitive and more user-friendly.

 

Oh, and if you want to get an idea of how much effort is needed for something as seemingly innocuous as updating an UI, look no further than here, which also explains why so much time elapsed between this upcoming release and the last... On a regular release, the number of "small" items you'd see on this list would be less than 30 whereas this one has more than 200!

 

Apart from that, the ChangeLog is as follows:

• UI redesign to follow the flow of user operations (with thanks to Fahad Al-Riyami for the concept)
• Drop XP and Vista platform support
• Switch all downloads to SSL and use https://rufus.ie as the new base URL
• Improve support of efi.img files on Linux ISOs
• Add ARM64 support for UEFI:NTFS
• Fix delays when querying floppy drives during device enumeration
• Improve translation support and remove manual positioning
• Internal fixes and improvements

Finally, it needs to be pointed out that, since I'm still chasing after translators, not all translations have been updated for the new UI.

 

As usual, because this is a BETA, I would greatly appreciate if you use the github issue tracker to report things that seem out of place or don't behave as expected, especially compared to Rufus 2.18.

 

Thanks!