Greeting's, to clarify; my question is not creating a Live USB drive or a persistence partition but creating a USB with GRUB bootloader (or other) and Kali which can be used on any machine. This is similar to running other linux OS directly from USB. I am currently running Ubuntu from a pen drive. I installed the OS (Ubuntu) and the bootloader on the pen drive and I can boot off it anywhere. Here is a video explaining the same (video is not by me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLYBXOVn6ow)
Since, Kali's installer doesn't give option to select which drive to write the booloader to and directly writes on the HDD (sda1). This means even if I partition and install Kali on a pen drive since the bootloader will be installed on the machines fixed primary drive, the USB drive will fail to boot on a different device.
I have two questions:
-
Anyone has any idea how to write bootloader to a USB drive and what parameters should be given so that it boots with Kali installed on it.
-
I am using graphic install mode for installing Kali on the USB drive, however there is no option for the install to be encrypted (Full disk encryption or at least /home folder to be encrypted). Does anyone know how can I install Kali with full disk / home folder encryption? Or enable is post install?
Thank You!
Best Answer
Install Kali into a VirtualBox VM with the USB attached as the first hard drive.
You can attach the USB to VirtualBox following this guide: Using a Physical Hard Drive with a VirtualBox VM
I have done this with Ubuntu 14.04 and it works quite well. The installation is bootable on most systems.
Addendum:
I'm going to elaborate, because I think this is a much overlooked solution...
I was asking myself this question over a year ago. I began with the persistence partition. To me, it felt like a convoluted, unnecessary hoop-jumping exercise to have the appearance of a system on a stick.
By installing directly to the USB stick through virtualbox, you won't have to partition a specific amount of space for the persistence volume; you are creating a fully bootable stick with full read and write access everywhere, as if the stick were a normal ssd drive.