I found an old laptop lying around and I figured I would install Kali Linux on it to learn more about penetration testing and to try to break into my servers for practice and learning more about creating a secure network.
I used unetbootin to install the Kali Linux ISO I downloaded via the torrent from their site, and the install to my flash drive went successfully.
On the laptop I was wanting to put Kali on, I went into the BIOS and ordered the USB to be the priority to boot from. After that, I booted live into Kali and installed the operating system from there. It loaded up the graphical install page from Kali and the install seemed to go successfully.
However, once the installation was successful, it would take me to the login page and prompt me for the root password. I would type in the root password I had used during the initial setup, yet it gives me the Incorrect password prompt, even though I am 100% sure I was using the password I had installed at the start.
To confirm this, I tried reinstalling from the live boot multiple times, using the same password from the first attempt and even just doing "password" for testing purposes. Neither one worked.
As a final measure, I opened up the GParted Partition Editor from the Kali live boot and deleted all of the partitions on my laptop's hard drive. From there, I went through the Kali installation process again successfully, only to encounter the EXACT same issue as before when trying to log in after installation.
Does anyone know what is going on? I am clueless as to what I could do to be able to log into my Kali installation… thanks.
Best Answer
Try this in login window:
the "root" is exactly word "root", means root user
the "password" is the password you created during installation.
From: https://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?18428-Username-PW-login-failure-to-Kali-Linux