Ive been having trouble flashing the kali distributions for ARM onto a sdcard to boot it up on my RPi. Ive used multiple different methods, none of which have worked for me. I have done days of research and have finally come to the conclusion that i can not get this working without some help or idea of what i could possibly be doing wrong. i have had success with plenty of other distributions like raspbian. i cant be the only one having these problems so hopefully if anything this post will help others out as well.
Problem:
Can Not successfully write kali linux to sdcard.
Hardware Used:
Gateway nv52 laptop with Windows 7 and Backtrack5 r3 running side by side
included sdcard that came with my Rpi which is an unknown 8gb class 4 sdcard
Sony 8gb class 4 sdcard that i had in my cell phone
PNY 16gb class 10 sdcard, PNY Multi-slot usb & flash card reader that i bought just to install kali with
Internal card reader from my laptop
Software Used:
Windows:
MD5_and_SHA_Checksum_Utility
7zip
winrar 5.1
Win32DiskImager
Linux:
Main terminal commands used- unxz and dd
Approaches Ive taken.
Windows
1. downloaded Kali from the downloads page and http://cdimage.kali.org/. versions 1.0.7 and 1.0.6, image and torrent downloads.
2. checked SHA1SUM with MD5_and_SHA_Checksum_Utility, Found correct SHA1sum. ( I am a little confused on if i am suppose to check against the img.xz file or the uncompressed .img file. the uncompressed file comes back with no match on SHA1SUM )
3. Uncompressed .img.xz with both 7zip and winrar.
4. Write to sdcard using Win32DiskImager
Ive tried this several times, with all 3 sdcards which work with raspbian. Tried writing with both my internal card reader and PNY usb reader. this has all been done with the armel 1.0.7 , armhf 1.0.7 and 1.0.6 armel. ive download those 3 versions both from the downloads page and here. http://cdimage.kali.org/, both the torrent and img file. so 12 different downloads with all the correct SHA1SUM that i have attempted to write to 3 different sdcards with 2 different card readers. that is 64 attempts on windows alone and every time i do that i have to reformat my sdcard using diskpart in cmd prompt because they are an unrecognized format and/or no longer the correct size in gigabytes.
ive done this whole process on my backtrack 5 distribution as well except i used "unxz imagefile.img.xz"
then wrote to sdcard using dd if=imagefile.img of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512k.
mounted, umounted, partition using fdisk.
ive used multipule other commands, nothing i try seems to work.
im completely lost as to why i can not get it working, if anyone has any suggestions or questions let me know so i can help you help me cause it has me mind boggled.