Note: From now on, every time you boot from USB, you must select Live USB Persistence in order for persistence to work correctly. To test if persistence is working correctly on Kali Linux 2021, try creating an empty test folder on the Desktop and restarting. Select Live USB Persistence and if the test folder is still there, persistence is working correctly.

For Kali Linux 2019 and below, the default user is “ root” and the password is “ toor”. However, if you do get a password prompt, the default username and password in Kali Linux 2021 is “kali”.

The menu may look slightly different depending on your version of Kali. In the Kali boot menu, select Live USB Persistence and press ENTER.

When the PC reboots, you should be presented with the Kali Linux 2021 Live boot menu. You may also have to disable Secure Boot in your BIOS in order to allow Kali to run. Repeatedly pressing one of the function keys ( F12, F2, etc) or the ESC or Delete keys on bootup will invoke the boot or BIOS menus on some machines, where you can select USB as the boot device. If this doesn’t work either, you may need to do some searching on how to boot from USB on your particular machine. If this doesn’t work and the PC boots straight back into Windows, hold down the SHIFT key while clicking Restart in the Windows start menu and select Boot from USB. On some PCs, you can simply restart the machine, and if the USB is plugged in, it should boot to Kali Linux 2021 Live automatically. It may take 10-30 minutes to write the Kali Linux 2021 Live ISO to USB depending on your hardware and size of USB. If you see a warning about Syslinux, click Yes.

Set a Persistent partition size, in this example, 4GB, though this can be as large as you want depending on your USB size.

Click SELECT and browse to the Kali Linux 2021 Live ISO you downloaded.

Write the ISO to your USB drive using a tool like Rufus, Universal USB Installer or UNetbootin. You can do this using Windows Disk Manager. Note: Before writing the ISO, it is strongly recommended that you delete all partitions from the USB drive if any exist, otherwise it may not boot properly. If you have a torrent client, use the Kali torrent download link to speed up the download (10 minutes) as sometimes throttle web downloads heavily. In this guide we are using the Kali Linux Intel/AMD 64-Bit (Live) image, which most modern PCs support. An updated guide will be published shortly. This guide has not been tested on Kali 2022.1 (released Feb 2022).

Kali linux usb installer