Kali boot usb drive not showing up in boot menu

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Level 1

4 points

Kali boot usb drive not showing up in boot menu

Hi, my name is Itamar, and I'm trying to boot Kali Linux from my MacBook Air late 2020.

I used both Balena Etcher and Terminal to create my bootable USB drive and both showed success.

So, I shut down my computer and press the power button until the boot menu shows up.

At this point, I'm getting the options: Macintosh HD, Options with the symbol of settings, but no USB drive that I named Kali. After that I press on the Macintosh HD because I don't want to recover my Mac; So I press on it and when my computer opens it immediately shows me the The disk you attached was not readable by this computer. Warning/Error.

Any ideas what's the problem and how can I fix it?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.3

Posted on Mar 12, 2022 4:28 AM

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Answer 1

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PRP_53

Level 10

84,931 points

Mar 12, 2022 6:43 AM in response to ItamarCohen

Kali on the Apple M1

As we announced in Kali 2021.1 we supported installing Kali Linux on Parallels on Apple Silicon Macs, well with 2021.4, we now also support it on the VMware Fusion Public Tech Preview thanks to the 5.14 kernel having the modules needed for the virtual GPU used. We also have updated the open-vm-tools package, and Kali’s installer will automatically detect if you are installing under VMware and install the open-vm-tools-desktoppackage, which should allow you to change the resolution out of the box. As a reminder, this is still a previewfrom VMware, so there may be some rough edges. There is no extra documentation for this because the installation process is the same as VMWare on 64-bit and 32-bit Intel systems, just using the arm64 ISO.

As a reminder, virtual machines on Apple Silicon are still limited to arm64 architecture only.

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Answer 2

ItamarCohen Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 12, 2022 5:20 AM in response to PRP_53

How can I change that? I installed it specifically for macOS M1 and it installed it as .iso file.

By running

diskutil list

I managed to get some information:

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: FDisk_partition_scheme *8.1 GB disk4

1: 0xEF ⁨⁩ 2.4 MB disk4s2

(free space) 5.6 GB -

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Answer 3

Mar 12, 2022 5:22 AM in response to ItamarCohen

ItamarCohen wrote:

...After that I press on the Macintosh HD because I don't want to recover my Mac; So I press on it and when my computer opens it immediately shows me the The disk you attached was not readable by this computer. Warning/Error.

It appears that in the process that the creation of the Kali Linux drive, it corrupted the EFI boot loader for your main drive.

What you may try is return to recovery and use Disk Utility within it and run Disk First Aid on the the drive, the container, and then the volumes within the drives container.

If that fails to resolve the issue then enter recovery once again and re-install macOS and see if that fixes things.

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