So I have looked over the forum and I see a few post about installing Kali live on a usb drive. I have been trying really hard over the last few days to get this done. It seems like a simple task. I have read the doc on the site for installing on usb with persistence. Here is what i have done.
I have tried using Rufus on windows 7. It writes the iso to the usb drive which i can then boot from on my test laptop. Problem is it uses the whole 16G usb drive which means I can't do persistence. I don't see a way to change this. The win32Diskimage app doesn't write at all. it fails and I can't remember the error.
On Mac OS i put the drive in and formatted as fat32. Used dd and it still fills up the whole drive. I tried to created a 5G partition and leave the rest free. I used dd again and then time it just writes to the 5G partition. Great. I power up my test vm on my Mac where I did a full install of Kali. I run gparted just like the doc. formatted the free space as ext4 label it persistence save my changes. Then take the drive to same test laptop and now it doesn't boot.
So test number three was to do the whole process in the Kali vm. So i copy the same iso over to my vm. Open up gparted and deleted all the partition on the drive. Run my dd cmd and this time it creates a small partition about 3G and the rest is free space. Next step is to run gparted and format the remaining space. Which doesn't work because gparted tells me i don't have a partition table. Which seems odd because the drive is mounted on the desktop and I can read and write to it. This test also doesn't boot.
This seems like a really straight forward process. I have used the same ISO each time. I must be messing up the formatting before i run dd. I don't know but I would like to get this to work. any help would be awesome.