6.2 Step-by-Step Installation on a Hard Drive
Key Takeaways
- The Kali boot menu offers a Graphical Install and a text-mode Install; both run the same Debian-Installer with a different frontend
- Since Kali 2020.1 the installer creates a standard non-root user (default username kali) with sudo rights — it does not prompt for a root password
- Guided partitioning offers four choices: use entire disk, entire disk with LVM, entire disk with encrypted LVM, and manual
- Encrypted LVM uses LUKS and requires a passphrase at every boot; forgetting it makes the data unrecoverable
- The installer writes GRUB to the MBR of the first disk on BIOS systems, or to the EFI System Partition on UEFI systems
6.2 Step-by-Step Installation on a Hard Drive
Quick Answer: Boot the USB media, choose Graphical Install, then answer the installer in order: language, location, keyboard, hostname, domain, user account, password, time zone, partitioning method, software selection, and finally GRUB to the MBR or EFI partition. Since 2020.1 the installer creates a non-root user — there is no root password prompt.
Kali's installer is a customized Debian-Installer, so anyone who has installed Debian will feel at home. The boot menu offers several entries; the two that matter are Graphical Install and Install. They are the same installer with different frontends — the graphical version uses a mouse and nicer rendering, while the text version works everywhere, including over serial consoles. Nothing about the installed system differs based on which you pick.
The First Screens
Language, location, keyboard. The installer first asks for the installation language, then your geographical location (which seeds the locale and time zone list), then the keyboard layout. Choose the keyboard that matches your physical hardware, not your language — a wrong layout here turns your disk-encryption passphrase into a lottery at the next boot.
Hardware detection and firmware. The installer loads components from the media and probes network hardware. Some Wi-Fi cards need non-free firmware; the installer may offer to load it from removable media. On a lab machine, a wired connection sidesteps this entirely.
Hostname and domain. You are prompted for a hostname — kali is the conventional default — and an optional domain name, which you can leave blank on a standalone machine.
User Creation: the 2020.1 Change
This is heavily tested. Older Kali releases ran everything as root with the infamous default password toor. Since Kali 2020.1, the installer creates a standard non-root user instead:
- Full name of the user (free-form).
- Username —
kaliis offered as the default. - Password, entered twice.
The resulting account is added to the sudo group, so administrative work runs through sudo. The installer never asks you to set a root password; the root account is present but not the intended login. This matches the live images, which since 2020.1 boot to a kali/kali user rather than root.
Clock. Select your time zone. The installer configures the clock and can sync via NTP so timestamps on logs and captures are trustworthy — something you will care about during engagements.
Partitioning: the Four Guided Choices
Partitioning is the step with the most exam weight. The guided menu offers four options:
| Option | What it does | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Guided - use entire disk | Erases the disk, creates a plain partition layout | Simple single-OS installs |
| Guided - use entire disk and set up LVM | Same, but inside a Logical Volume Manager layer | You want resizable volumes later |
| Guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM | LVM inside a LUKS-encrypted container | Full-disk encryption with a boot passphrase |
| Manual | You define every partition yourself | Dual boot, custom layouts, separate disks |
After picking a non-manual method, you choose a sub-scheme: all files in one partition, separate /home partition, or separate /home, /var, and /tmp partitions. For a first lab install, all files in one partition is the least painful choice.
LVM (Logical Volume Manager) inserts an abstraction layer between partitions and filesystems so volumes can be resized, snapshotted, and spanned across disks after installation — handy when a 20 GB disk turns out to be small.
Encrypted LVM wraps the LVM physical volume in LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) encryption. The installer asks for a passphrase; you will type it at every boot before the system can read anything. Choose it for laptops that leave the house. The exam-relevant warning: there is no recovery mechanism, so a forgotten passphrase means the data is gone.
Manual partitioning is required for dual-booting alongside another OS — you shrink the existing system, create at least a root partition (/), optionally swap and /home, and on UEFI systems keep or create the EFI System Partition (a small FAT32 partition mounted at /boot/efi).
Whichever path you take, the installer shows a summary and asks you to confirm write changes to disk. Nothing is destroyed until you say yes here.
Software Selection, Mirror, and GRUB
The installer then copies the base system and asks whether to use a network mirror — say yes so packages come from kali-rolling and the system is current. Software selection lets you pick a desktop environment (Xfce is the default; GNOME and KDE Plasma are alternatives) and tool collections; the default selection corresponds to kali-linux-default.
Finally comes the GRUB bootloader. On a BIOS system the installer offers to install GRUB to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the first drive, typically /dev/sda — answer yes unless another bootloader owns that disk. On UEFI systems GRUB is written to the EFI System Partition instead, and no device question appears. If you kept another OS, GRUB's os-prober adds it to the boot menu.
When the installer announces completion, remove the USB stick and reboot. Log in as the non-root user you created, then run sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y to pull the system fully up to date with the rolling repository.
On Kali 2020.1 and later, what kind of account does the hard-disk installer ask you to create?
Which guided partitioning option gives you full-disk encryption that requires a passphrase at every boot?