Why Rufus Can’t Download Windows ISOs Anymore – and How the New Fido Fix Solves It
Rufus, the lightweight USB bootable creator, recently failed to download Windows ISO files via its built‑in Fido script after Microsoft altered its servers, but a community‑tested fix that adjusts the request’s referrer has been merged into Fido 1.31, restoring automated Windows USB creation.
Rufus is a small, open‑source USB bootable‑disk creator (≈1.3 MB) that can turn Windows, Linux and other ISO images into bootable USB drives.
One of its features is the built‑in Fido script, which lets users download system files and create bootable media with a single click, without pre‑downloading the ISO.
Recently Microsoft changed its servers, causing the Fido script to fail when trying to download Windows 8, 10 and 11 ISOs, resulting in errors such as “cannot get architecture from server”.
The problem was first noticed by GitHub user Voltagex, who reported an inability to download Windows 10 21H2 Build 19044.1288.
Developer Pete Batard confirmed the issue and suggested that Microsoft deliberately blocked the script’s queries, forcing the use of the internal GetProductDownloadLinksBySku request, which now fails outside the Microsoft download page.
From further investigation, Microsoft definitely blocked our script queries. The only usable query, GetProductDownloadLinksBySku , must be sent from within the Microsoft web page; external requests now return errors. Previously, independent HTTP queries could retrieve the content, but Microsoft’s server changes now cause errors for out‑of‑context requests.
Developer William Bulin discovered that Microsoft added extra referrer restrictions, preventing third‑party access to download links. By correctly setting the referrer in Fido, he fixed the issue, and the fix was merged into Fido 1.31, released yesterday.
Pete Batard said he will ensure Rufus adopts the updated script soon, restoring the ability to download and create Windows bootable USB drives.
Related link: https://github.com/pbatard/Fido/issues/41
Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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