Fido 1.60

Fido is a PowerShell script that is primarily designed to be used in Rufus, but that can also be used in standalone fashion, and whose purpose is to automate access to the official Microsoft Windows retail ISO download links as well as provide convenient access to bootable UEFI Shell images.

This script exists because, while Microsoft does make retail ISO download links freely and publicly available (at least for Windows 8 through Windows 11), up until recent releases, most of these links were only available after forcing users to jump through a lot of unwarranted hoops that created an exceedingly counterproductive, if not downright unfriendly, consumer experience, that greatly detracted from what people really want (direct access to ISO downloads).

As to the reason one might want to download Windows retail ISOs, as opposed to the ISOs that are generated by Microsoft's own Media Creation Tool (MCT), this is because using official retail ISOs is currently the only way to assert with absolute certainty that the OS content has not been altered. Indeed, because there only exists a single master for each of them, Microsoft retail ISOs are the only ones you can obtain an official SHA-1 for (from MSDN, if you have access to it, or from sites such as this one) allowing you to be 100% sure that the image you are using has not been corrupted and is safe to use.

This, in turn, offers assurance that the content YOU are using to install your OS, which it is indeed critical to validate beforehand if you have the slightest concern about security, does match, bit for bit, the one that Microsoft released.

On the other hand, regardless of the manner in which Microsoft's Media Creation Tool produces its content, because no two MCT ISOs are ever the same (due to MCT always regenerating the ISO content on the fly) it is currently impossible to validate with absolute certainty whether any ISO that was generated by the MCT is safe to use. Especially, unlike what is the case for retail ISOs, it is impossible to tell whether an MCT ISO may have been corrupted after generation.

Hence the need to provide users with a much easier and less restrictive way to access official retail ISOs...