Making a Kali Bootable USB Drive (macOS/OS X)
Our favourite way, and the fastest method, for getting up and running with Kali Linux is to run it โliveโ from a USB drive. This method has several advantages:
Itโs non-destructive - it makes no changes to the host systemโs hard drive or installed OS, and to go back to normal operations, you simply remove the โKali Liveโ USB drive and restart the system.
Itโs portable - you can carry Kali Linux in your pocket and have it running in minutes on an available system
Itโs customizable - you can roll your own custom Kali Linux ISO image and put it onto a USB drive using the same procedures
Itโs potentially persistent - with a bit of extra effort, you can configure your Kali Linux โliveโ USB drive to have persistent storage, so the data you collect is saved across reboots
In order to do this, we first need to create a bootable USB drive which has been set up from an ISO image of Kali Linux.
What Youโll Need
A verified copy of the appropriate ISO image of the latest Kali build image for the system youโll be running it on: see the details on downloading official Kali Linux images.
If youโre running under macOS/OS X, you can use the
dd
command, which is pre-installed on those platforms, or use Etcher.A USB thumb drive, 4GB or larger. (Systems with a direct SD card slot can use an SD card with similar capacity. The procedure is identical.)
Kali Linux Live USB Install Procedure
The specifics of this procedure will vary depending on whether youโre doing it on a Windows, Linux, or macOS/OS X system.
Creating a Bootable Kali USB Drive on macOS/OS X (DD)
macOS/OS X is based on UNIX, so creating a bootable Kali Linux USB drive in an macOS/OS X environment is similar to doing it on Linux. Once youโve downloaded and verified your chosen Kali ISO file, you use dd
to copy it over to your USB drive. If you would prefer to use Etcher, then follow the same directions as a Windows user. Note that the USB drive will have a path similar to /dev/disk2.
WARNING: Although the process of imaging Kali on a USB drive is very easy, you can just as easily overwrite a disk drive you didnโt intend to with dd if you do not understand what you are doing, or if you specify an incorrect output path. Double-check what youโre doing before you do it, itโll be too late afterwards.
Consider yourself warned.
Without the USB drive plugged into the system, open a Terminal window, and type the command
diskutil list
at the command prompt.You will get a list of the device paths (looking like /dev/disk0, /dev/disk1, etc.) of the disks mounted on your system, along with information on the partitions on each of the disks.
3. Plug in your USB device to your Apple computerโs USB port and run the command diskutil list
a second time. Your USB driveโs path will most likely be the last one. In any case, it will be one which wasnโt present before. In this example, you can see that there is now a /dev/disk6 which wasnโt previously present.
4. Unmount the drive (assuming, for this example, the USB drive is /dev/disk6 - do not simply copy this, verify the correct path on your own system!):
Proceed to (carefully!) image the Kali ISO file on the USB device. The following command assumes that your USB drive is on the path /dev/disk6, and youโre in the same directory with your Kali Linux ISO, which is named โkali-linux-2022.4-live-amd64.isoโ. We will replace /dev/disk6 with /dev/rdisk6 to improve the write speeds:
There is a chance you may receive an error when running the above command, that you will receive the following error:
If this is the case, please change the 4M
to be 4m
. Additionally, increasing the blocksize (bs) will speed up the write progress, but will also increase the chances of creating a bad USB drive. Using the given value on macOS/OS X has produced reliable images consistently.
Another potential error will be that status=progress
does not work on your version of macOS. If this is the case, remove this section and instead use CTRL+T
to measure status.
Imaging the USB drive can take a good amount of time, over half an hour is not unusual, as the sample output below shows. Be patient!
The dd command provides no feedback until itโs completed, but if your drive has an access indicator, youโll probably see it flickering from time to time. The time to dd
the image across will depend on the speed of the system used, USB drive itself, and USB port itโs inserted into. Once dd has finished imaging the drive, it will output something that looks like this:
And thatโs it!
Creating a Bootable Kali USB Drive on macOS/OS X (Etcher)
Alternatively, Etcher can be used.
Download and run Etcher.
Choose the Kali Linux ISO file to be imaged with โselect imageโ and verify that the USB drive to be overwritten is the correct one. Click the โFlash!โ button once ready.
3. Once Etcher alerts you that the image has been flashed, you can safely remove the USB drive.
You can now boot into a Kali Live / Installer environment using the USB device.
To boot from an alternate drive on an macOS/OS X system, bring up the boot menu by pressing the Option key immediately after powering on the device and select the drive you want to use.
For more information, see Appleโs knowledge base.
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