How to dual-boot Kali Linux // William Roberts

Recently I've been using Kali Linux as a VM through Oracle VirtualBox, but there are some major limitations to using a VM instead of dual-booting. I also just earned my CompTIA A+ certification! So I decided to go ahead and make the change, and while it wasn't too difficult, here are some tips on how to do it! Bonus tip: make sure to memorize things like UEFI to GPT, boot order, operating system troubleshooting, and Windows Defender settings, as this will be on the CompTIA A+ exams.

The first thing you'll need to do is shrink your current partition. Given that you're only running one OS on your hardware, you'll want to shrink its available storage so it can be allocated to Kali (or any other OS you want to run). You'll also need to make sure Fast Startup and BitLocker are disabled. Save your BitLocker recovery key and set your system to decrypted. Fast Startup needs to be turned off, because with it on, your Windows OS won't actually shut off, it just goes into a half-hibernated state.

Another thing to mention: your Windows OS might try to quarantine or delete the files being extracted to your drive (because it has a lot of flagged names lol), so make sure to turn real-time protection off. Don't worry, it'll come back on on the next boot.

Step 1

Right-click on the Windows icon on your taskbar and select Disk Management (MacOS and Linux are slightly different, so I'll cover that another day). Then select the letter-tagged drive, mine is C:. Another hint is that it will probably read NTFS under file system. NTFS is the default file system Windows uses to store, manage, and organize the files on your HDD or SSD that hold your system data!

Step 2

Right-click the partition and click Shrink Volume. It will query the shrink space, so just give it a second and then it'll open a new window! Once the shrink window opens, you'll want to decide how much you want to shrink. This is important depending on what OS you're running and what you intend to use it for. Personally, I keep all of my wordlists for password-cracking and etc. on a thumb-drive with a spare backup, meaning I won't need all that much storage, so I gave mine around 60 GB. That's enough for Kali as well as the kali-linux-large metapackage you might want to download once you're set up.

Step 3

Once that's completed, download the latest Kali Linux ISO. Just go for the base installer, not Everything, Weekly, or NetInstaller. Then download Rufus from Rufus.ie. This is going to be how we load our thumb-drive with that sweet ISO file we just grabbed. With the thumb-drive in your PC, open up Rufus, drag that ISO file over, and you're good to go. For the Device, select your thumb-drive. If it asks about a DBX update, just say no. Persistent partition size can be set to 0 (no persistence). Make sure that you're set to UEFI GPT, you'll want to use this for every setup in the future, and it's good to remember because it's an industry standard! Then just hit Start.

Step 4

After it's done, you'll want to restart your machine. Pressing F11 as you boot up will bring you to the boot menu. Pick the entry starting with UEFI and the USB name, in my case it was 'D:'. Choose Graphical Install and walk through the setup screens.

Step 5

This is an important step, so I'll be as straightforward as possible. Choose "Guided, use the largest continuous free space." That will land Kali in the partition gap you created earlier. Do NOT pick "Use entire disk," unless you want to wipe your current OS lol. Accept "all files in one partition" and write the changes.

Step 6

Leave Secure Boot on, and install GRUB (this will make switching between operating systems wayyyy easier). On reboot you'll get Kali on top with Windows Boot Manager below it.

Step 7

This refreshes the package list and upgrades your installed packages. If you want an even 'large'er assortment of tools, you can run this: sudo apt update && sudo apt install kali-linux-large -y

Step 8

Enjoy responsibly! If you're using this as a penetration testing tool, that's okay, but make sure that whatever systems you're testing are owned by you, or that you have direct authorization to test those systems.

Stay salty, chooms.