Can Most Laptops Boot from NTFS-Formatted USB Sticks Today?

Using tools like Rufus can help because it will create a USB drive with both FAT32 and NTFS partitions. It installs the required NTFS drivers during boot, allowing you to manage installations from an NTFS drive smoothly. This method also allows for custom tweaks.

When making a bootable USB, always include a FAT32 or exFAT partition. If you want the USB to boot from NTFS, you'd need a compatible EFI executable to read NTFS. Microsoft has some guidance on how to set this up, check it out in their documentation.

Historically speaking, hardware has never natively supported booting from NTFS since booting doesn't work that way. Pre-UEFI BIOS systems didn't recognize filesystems at all. Now, with UEFI, it primarily works with FAT32, and the bootloader resides on a dedicated partition. So, straightforward support for NTFS might not be common yet.

I doubt you'll find concrete numbers around NTFS support in UEFI, as it's not part of the specification. Typically, UEFI only accounts for FAT32. The Rufus developers had to create their own NTFS driver because of the widespread lack of compatibility. That's worth keeping in mind.

Recently, I've noticed that many laptops, especially from brands like Dell, have begun to support booting from NTFS drives in UEFI mode. While it's not a requirement in UEFI spec, manufacturers often include it, making it common in newer devices.