PSA: Windows 11's BYPASSNRO is still part of Rufus as it receives its latest update

An image showing Rufus creating Windows 11 install USB

Rufus, the highly popular utility used for creating bootable media, has received its latest update today. The application received its last update back in October. That was a stable update, and it was a major one too, as it added a bypass for unsupported systems on Windows 11 24H2.

Rufus has, for the longest time, helped users workaround these problems. For example, the app, alongside others like Ventoy, allows skipping the requirements like internet connectivity and Microsoft Account (MSA) during Windows 11 installs.

So for those pissed about the recent dumping of BYPASSNRO script in Windows 11 24H2, Rufus can still do as it automatically makes the necessary Registry edits to re-create the BYPASSNRO file. Interestingly, users can also use another Registry trick for the same, and this method is actually officially endorsed by Microsoft itself.

The latest version of Rufus adds a mechanism to automatically detect and download updated Secure Boot DBXs from the official UEFI repo. Zstd compression support is now here, and in terms of bug fixes, there a quite a few too. A memory leak issue related to the user interface has been fixed, and a DLL sideloading vulnerability has been addressed. The version also drops ARM 32-bit support.

The full changelog is given below:

Add a mechanism to detect and download updated DBXs from the official UEFI repository

Add ztsd compression support for disk images

Add a new exclusion feature in the settings, to ignore disks with a specific GPT GUID

Improve detection for compressed VHD images that are too large to fit the target drive

Fix commandline hogger not being deleted when running Rufus from a different directory

Fix FAT filenames from embedded images being potentially truncated on image extraction

Fix a side-loading vulnerability [CVE-2025-26624] with cfgmgr32.dll (with thanks to @EmperialX)

Fix UI memory leaks (courtesy of @ozone10)

Fall back to user/system default locale when getting error description (courtesy of @Wack0)

Don't run the commandline hogger on POSIX shells

Drop ARM 32-bit builds (Note that ARM 64-bit builds are NOT affected by this)

To download the update, head over to the Neowin software stories page or the official GitHub repo of Rufus. Keep in mind, though, that this is a beta release.

Update, April 9, 13.00 EST: Rufus has released the stable version of this. The changelog remains the same. You can download it from the Neowin software stories page or the official GitHub repo.