How to boot kali from native usb [duplicate]
Last night I made a kali linux usb. Now this isn’t the live usb I literally installed kali on the drive. I did this from my desktop which meant naturally I had to install the grub for my boot loader. The issue I am having is this; I cannot boot the usb on my laptop. It shows up in my boot menu and once selected and it attempts to boot I just get a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I believe this is because I do not have the grub on my laptop, and I am having some difficulty finding a suitable grub to install to mitigate this problem. I would just install kali on my laptop but I am not ready to do away with my win7 OS at this time and still need it. So what ever solution can be found to this conundrum needs to be able to allow me to boot from my hard drive in windows and yet boot kali from its native usb. Any ideas?
You don’t need grub to boot from an USB, if that was the case, people installing alongside Windows et al couldn’t boot their live USB. How you created the USB in first place?
If you installed GRUB properly to the USB then it shouldn’t need any files off the laptop’s HD. However, booting from a USB flash drive can be problematic with some computers. Have you successfully booted any other OS from USB? Does your laptop use UEFI or BIOS booting?
2 Answers 2
When you say «once selected and it attempts to boot», you mean Kali’s own boot menu never appears? If it’s own menu does appear that would mean it’s already got grub working ok, but something else stops it from booting, maybe it needs a kernel option like nomodeset or noacpi or others.
There might be easier ways to use Kali Linux from a USB though.
- Kali Linux Live USB Install (really just writing a live iso to USB, like most other live iso’s, but Kali calls it «USB Install»)
- Kali Linux Live USB Persistence (with optional LUKS encryption too)
But, if you’re going with a full «hard disk» install onto your USB the installer should’ve put grub onto the drive on it’s own. The installer says it would put GRUB onto «your first hard drive,» so when you installed Kali on your Desktop, does «naturally I had to install the grub for my boot loader» mean that you put GRUB onto your desktop HD, replacing whatever bootloader it used to have?
If you were to install Kali onto the USB again, but having any other drives (hard or other) unplugged, that should only give Kali’s installer one place to install grub (the USB).
Or you could install grub onto the USB yourself, using the Kali live iso should work, or using another live iso like Ubuntu, Mint. If your Kali USB device is /dev/sdx , and you mount your Kali USB partition to /mnt/USB/ , then this should install grub:
grub-install --force --no-floppy --boot-directory=/mnt/USB/boot /dev/sdx