Install kali Linux on an USB SSD or drive

For who is this guide?

• People who can’t install Kali or any other Linux distro because their external USB drive (mostly USB 3.0) is not found by the installer
• People who want to install kali on an external thumb drive
• People who want to install Kali with full disk encryption… on a partition. Yes, you heard that right.
• People who to port their Virtual machine to a real machine.

Note: This is not a Live Kali but an installed version with the USB stick acting as any hard disk would do.

Method

We use Virtualbox for this tutorial. Parallels didn’t worked for me because I was not able to convert my image to a .ISO or .DMG file. To use VMWare you need a way to convert your .vmdk file to an .ISO or .DMG file which is not covered by this tutorial. However, you can use “poweriso” to convert* that.

Now you can create a virtual machine and install kali on it like you would normally do. Create a new virtual machine, either Ubuntu 32-bit or Ubuntu 64-bit depending on which Kali version you intend to install. Make the VM hard disk smaller than the capacity of the target USB stick/drive as they practically never have the claimed capacity and VDI images do expand when converting to image files.

Make sure that you use the option to pre-allocate the storage instead of dynamically allocate.

If the installation is finished you can shutdown your virtual machine.

Now we use a tool which is bundled with Virtualbox to convert the .vdi file to a raw image file.

VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw kali.vdi kali.img

Write kali.img to an USB stick using your favourite method (e.g. dd in Linux/BSD or Win32DiskImager in Windows).
For example:

dd bs=1m if=/Users/vincentcox/Desktop/kali.img of=/dev/diskn

Remember to replace “n” with the disknumber of your external hard drive/USB!

On mac you can see this in disk utility.

Done! Boot from the USB stick and be happy!