Rufus No Device

[Timmy Tatel]

Its seems that Windows thinks that my device is ready to play at some point and tries to mount it or something. Why Rufus can't block this device while using it? It is really annoying to close explorer.exe every time i need a bootable usb stick.

For instance, what most people don't know is that Windows (e.g. VDS) won't let you clean up the existing partitions of a physical disk unless you have unlocked that disk first... which is very counter-intuitive and means that, during that time, there's no way of preventing other applications from accessing that disk.

In short, Rufus very much tries to lock both the physical disk and logical volumes as required, but it isn't always as logical as one expects. Another example of it is that, to get a newly formatted volume recognized, Windows also forces you to dismount the volume (as per the notes here), which means that, even if you acquired a lock on the volume, you have no choice but to relinquish it to keep Windows happy. Therefore, whereas there are many instances where Rufus would like nothing more but to keep a lock to the drive to prevent external interferences, Microsoft have designed their OS in such a manner that we can't do that, which of course opens the door for the kind of problem you observed.

Just note however that, according to your message, it is unlikely that it is actually explorer.exe itself that is the issue, as the (r) you see means it's only requesting read access, which shouldn't prevent Rufus from getting exclusive access to the volume. Most likely the actual conflict comes from one of the internal Windows processes or services, that are high level enough that they can't be listed (while Rufus tries to help by listing the processes accessing the drive, there's only so much it can do against Windows privileged processes, which are incredibly hard to enumerate). Most likely, you'll want to check that you aren't using one the the applications that is listed at the end of the Rufus FAQ, as some of these are known to be a bit too trigger happy with accessing volumes that they shouldn't be accessing when they have no business to do so.

Alternatively, since ironically your issue is likely the result of Rufus not being able to "block this device while using it" (by not being able to obtain the exclusive lock it requests to keep other applications at bay), you may want to press Alt-, (that's the Alt and comma keys) in Rufus, so that it won't try to lock drives.

Of course, if you do so, then there is always a risk that whatever other process is also trying to access said drive might modify it at the same time as Rufus is performing its operations, which could result in corrupted data or an unbootable drive (which is the precise reason why Rufus requests an exclusive lock by default)...

Disable the Windows 10 feature that automatically opens USB drives in Explorer, temporarily. The drive was opening over and over again in explorer, which matches the problem pretty clearly...

I'm also running Avira anti-virus, (edit: which is listed as incompatible by Rufus). Temporarily turn off Avira real-time protection for 10 minutes while running Rufus. This step on its own didn't fix the problem, so I'm not sure it's even necessary as long as you do the previous 2 steps.

If your USB got corrupted, you might need to reenable the "Open folder to view files" option in order to get windows to give you the "there's a problem with this drive, do you want to fix it?" popup. Re-disable the option once the drive is fixed and you want to try to write to it with Rufus again.

But I think I figured it out:In the Boot Selection you can hit the select button then select your file, but if you had put your file that you're trying to boot in the USB that your using then it won't work.

First of all, Rufus didn't damage your USB drive. It only removed the letter Windows assigned it, which it needs to do to be able to repartition and format it, and since you cancelled that operation, the drive letter was not assigned back. This is why you couldn't see it in Explorer, but you could still see it in Device Manager/Disk Manager.

The simple option, to make your drive listed again so that you could format it and get a letter reassigned, was to follow this entry from the Rufus FAQ. A couple of clicks in Rufus was all that was needed.

Also, the latest versions of Rufus has improved the default enumeration process and will automatically list raw or unpartitioned drives, so you should no longer have to do anything even if you cancel in the middle of a bad blocks check or a format operation.

But by Rufus it can be seen as "NO_LABEL (Disk 2) [16GB]".I just selected "boot section" dropdown menu to "not bootable", clicked "start" in Rufus. And voila my USB stick is now again recognized in windows :)

Another possibility is the device used to connect the USB drive to the PC doesn't fully support the drive - it can use it, but not format it properly. You may not be aware of this without checking the device's specs. In this case the USB drive can be reformatted using a device that does fully support it, and then Rufus will work through that device.

Specific example: I tried to use a 256Gb SD card in a GoPro Connect2 camera, which only fully supports 64Gb cards. Rufus (v3.14 in Windows 10) couldn't complete writing an image to it, and when I tried again with option "Check device for bad blocks" it seemed to get stuck in a loop (I left it on 64%, next morning it was back on 23%); when I cancelled the check the card was left unusable, similar to what OP saw - and was invisible even in Disk Manager on Windows 10. I used a newer camera to reformat it and then tried Rufus again and it worked fine.

I am installing Leap onto my Dell Laptop on to a separate Hard Drive so that I can use either Windows or Leap without dual booting from one hard drive. I have downloaded and made a bootable USB Drive using Rufus. My issue is that my Dell XPS laptop uses UEFI Bios and does not allow me to select the USB Drive itself. Instead it is asking for a specific file from the USB Stick. Can somebody please let me know which file I need to select to be able to boot and install Leap from? If you need any more infomation or if i am missing something please let me know and I will try to fill in.

Regards

Charles

I have no idea what Rufus does to your USB and you probably should be addressing your question to Rufus community. The standard way to create bootable openSUSE USB is to dd the image onto the full drive (not partition).

Hi there, many thanks for the reply. I will try to expand a bit more. I was hoping that the option to select the USB drive would be there however its not. When i enter Bios to select the bootable media, it asks you add a bootable device. When you go to add a bootable device it brings up the usb drive, but is asking for a specific file within the .opensuse iso file itself. I have tried to select different files with.efi file name but to no success.

I tried creating a virtual machine ti run this from in windows 11, however i need it to connect to be able to plug an ethernet cable in, but it would not regconise it even after creating virtual switches and selecting different options.

You just repeated what you said before. Again - we do not know what Rufus put on this USB so we cannot tell what file to select. The standard bootable image would be \EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi, but if firmware fails to detect USB as bootable, this file is probably missing.

This page discusses various multi-platform methods on how to create an Arch Linux Installer USB drive (also referred to as "flash drive", "USB stick", "USB key", etc) for booting in BIOS and UEFI systems. The result will be a live USB system that can be used for installing Arch Linux, system maintenance or for recovery purposes, and that, because of using Overlayfs for /, will discard all changes once the computer shuts down.

If you would like to run a full install of Arch Linux from a USB drive (i.e. with persistent settings), see Install Arch Linux on a removable medium. If you would like to use your bootable Arch Linux USB stick as a rescue USB, see chroot.

KDE ISO Image Writer can be downloaded via isoimagewriter. It can auto-detect the USB-drive and you need to manually select a ISO file. It is recommended to use .sig file to signature but it can be skipped by clicking "create".

Linux distributions running GNOME can easily make a live USB through nautilus and gnome-disk-utility. Simply right-click on the .iso file, and select Open With Disk Image Writer. When GNOME Disk Utility opens, specify the flash drive from the Destination drop-down menu and click Start Restoring.

xorriso-dd-target (from libisoburn) is a shell script which attempts to reduce the risk of overwriting the wrong storage device. Its safest mode is named -plug_test. For example, to use it as a regular user who can elevate to root using sudo:

KDE ISO Image Writer can be downloaded as .exe file at isoimagewriter. It can auto-detect the USB-drive and you need to manually select a ISO file. It is recommended to use .sig file to signature but it can be skipped by clicking "create".

win32diskimager is another graphical tool for writing images to USB sticks or SD/CF cards from Windows. Select your ISO image and the target USB drive letter (you may have to format it first to assign it a drive letter), and click Write.

This method does not require any workaround and is as straightforward as dd under Linux. Just download the Arch Linux ISO, and with local administrator rights use the USBwriter utility to write to your USB flash memory.

If your Arch Linux ISO is elsewhere you may need to state the full path, for convenience you may wish to put the Arch Linux ISO into the same folder as the dd executable. The basic format of the command will look like this.

Your USB device will appear as something like /dev/disk2 (external, physical). Verify that this is the device you want to erase by checking its name and size and then use its identifier for the commands below instead of /dev/diskX.

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