kali live boot usb (persistence) / fat 32 partition windows 7

[qcriderfan87]

Kali 1.0.4 amd 64
32 GB sandisk cruzer fit
Used gparted to mount Kali and persistence as per instructions (ext 2?)(ext 4) respectively
Using gparted to allocate remaining space to fat 32
In windows 7, says disk not recognized, please format
Want to be able to store files/portable applications from windows

Have searched for instructions to get this working it is needed for school. I'm typing on smart phone on public WiFi no internet service at home hopefully this thread goes through...

Specs
Fx-6200 CPU
8 GB ram
As rock mobo

[jwynn57]

Kali 1.0.4 amd 64
32 GB sandisk cruzer fit
Used gparted to mount Kali and persistence as per instructions (ext 2?)(ext 4) respectively
Using gparted to allocate remaining space to fat 32
In windows 7, says disk not recognized, please format
Want to be able to store files/portable applications from windows

Have searched for instructions to get this working it is needed for school. I'm typing on smart phone on public WiFi no internet service at home hopefully this thread goes through...

Specs
Fx-6200 CPU
8 GB ram
As rock mobo

You need to boot your computer from the flash drive at this point. At the Kali start menu make sure to press Tab and add persistence to the code

[persistence]

Here's how to setup a 32gb flash drive with the following:
4GB Reserved for Kali Install and future updates
4GB Persistence partition for changes you make to Kali
All remaining space available read/write in Windows AND Kali as a standard Windows partition

Required tools:
---------------
Kali Live DVD - this was written using version 1.0.5 32-bit
32GB USB Flash drive - you can use a bigger or smaller drive, but you will have to adjust these instructions to fit
A computer to boot the Live DVD

Extra info:
-----------
You can also use a live USB flash drive in place of a Live DVD IF you have created it with dd as shown on the docs.kali.org site. If you created it with unetbootin or something similar you may get different results since you could potentially have a lot of extra files in there with your Kali image.

This whole thing is written assuming you are running from the Kali Live DVD while you are doing this process. I did that to make things simpler for people who are less experienced with Linux. You can do this from a different distribution, but you will have to change some parts to fit your needs. All commands should be run as root.

Instructions:
-------------
0. Backup any important files on your flash drive. Power down your computer and unplug all external hard drives and flash drives from your computer for their safety.

1. Boot to the Kali DVD.

2. Plug in the 32GB flash drive you want to set all this up on.

3. You will need grub2 for this to work, but it isn't installed on the Live DVD, so install it by running:

apt-get update ; apt-get install grub2

When prompted, DO NOT install the grub boot loader to any hard drives (there should be no asterisks in the boxes at the prompt).

4. Run "fdisk -l" or "dmesg" to find your flash drive's device. Mine is /dev/sda, so when you see /dev/sda for the rest of these instructions you should always put your device instead of mine if it is different. If your computer has a hard drive installed (mine didn't) yours may be /dev/sdb.

5. Run "mount" to be sure it's not mounted anywhere (you shouldn't see it or any partitions that start with that device in the list). If it is mounted, unmount it like this:

umount /dev/sda1

6. Time to create the partitions. Run gparted like so:

gparted /dev/sda

7. In gparted, delete all existing partitons on the flash drive. Then create the following new partitions:

-- New Partition #1 --
Primary Partition
File system: fat32
Free space preceding: 1
Size in MiB: 21000 (gparted reports my drive is actually 29GB, so I had to adjust)
Label: whatever you want the drive to be named in Windows

-- New Partition #2 --
Primary Partition
Free space preceding: 0
Size: (I currently have 8774 left, so I will use half of that) 4364
File system: ext2
label: persistence

-- New Partition #3 --
Primary Partition
Free space preceding: 0
Size: 4387 (everything that is left)
Free space following: 0
File system: fat32
label: Kali Live

8. Click the check mark button to "apply all operations". Wait for them to finish, then quit gparted.

9. Mount the "Kali Live" partition by clicking on the Places menu at the top of the Kali desktop.

10. Open a terminal. Run "mount" to verify where the partition is mounted.

Example:

# mount | grep Kali

/dev/sda3 on /media/Kali Live type vfat (rw…

11. Install grub by replacing the root directory in the following command with the mount point from the output of the mount command above:

Here's the example:

grub-install --root-directory=[Kali Live mount point from step 10] /dev/sda --modules=fat

Here's what I actually typed:

grub-install --root-directory="/media/Kali Live" /dev/sda --modules=fat

Make sure you use quotes like I did if there are spaces in your mount point path. From now on when you see "/media/Kali Live" in my instructions, replace it with your mount point if different.

12. Ok, now time to copy all the Kali files to the right partition. In your terminal, run:

cp -av /lib/live/mount/medium/. "/media/Kali Live"

Be sure to include the "/." after medium so hidden files get copied. If you are not running from a Kali live DVD or dd'ed live USB when you do this, you will have to mount the Kali ISO somewhere and replace /lib/live/mount/medium to that path.

13. Setting up persistence. Mount the "persistence" partition by clicking on it in the places menu.

14. In the terminal, run:

echo "/ union" > /media/persistence/persistence.conf

Again, replace /media/persistence with the path where your persistence partition is mounted if necessary.

15. Open leafpad (Applications > Accessories > Leafpad). Create the following file and save it as "/media/Kali Live/boot/grub/grub.cfg":

set timeout=10
set default=0

menuentry "Kali Linux Live (686-pae)" {
linux /live/vmlinuz boot=live noconfig=sudo username=root hostname=kali
initrd /live/initrd.img
}

menuentry "Kali Linux Live Persistent (686-pae)" {
linux /live/vmlinuz boot=live noconfig=sudo username=root hostname=kali persistence
initrd /live/initrd.img
}

16. All done! You should now have a working Kali Live USB with persistence and a Windows-friendly partition.

Updating to new versions:
-------------------------
If you want to update to a future version of Kali, you should be able to do so by doing the following:

1. Delete all the files on the "Kali Live" partition and replace them with the files from the new version's Live DVD.

2. Delete all the files on the "persistence" partition, except for persistence.conf.

3. Update the grub.cfg file (probably not necessary for minor version changes).