The Need
The company I work for provides me with all I could want or need when it comes to a home office. I’ve got a Mac Studio and a MBP and hardware is refreshed about every year and a half. But the drawback is that I have to limit the personal things I do on these machines. I don’t mind doing video editing and things of that nature on these macs, but I draw the line at HackTheBox, TryHackMe, and now the courses for PEH and going after my first Cyber Security cert, the OSCP.
I grabbed a refurbished Lenovo X1 Carbon off of New Egg and I love it. I just converted it to dual boot, so I can use Windows if needed, but mostly it will be for Kali.
Non-Apple Computer
I have not owned a non-apple laptop in years and years. The last time I used a Windows laptop was it was running Windows XP. I don’t like Windows, even though I used it heavily prior and up to XP. Once I forced myself to switch to a Linux desktop and then eventually splitting my time between Linux and MacOS, I never looked back.
I am impressed with this laptop. It’s not a power house machine, it’s got an I5 because I wanted to spend the money on the RAM instead and the price point changes drastically if you get 32GB of memory with the I7 chipset vs an I7 with 16GB of memory. This laptop looks and acts brand-new even though it’s a refurb, I am so impressed. It’s got so many features, well above and beyond my MBP. I wish Apple would get with the times and add these things. It’s making me feel discontent with being in the Apple ecosystem honestly. But I am not willing to go back to Windows, so I’ll stay with Apple, it’s also my company’s mandated platform.
I do like having the Windows option, so it’s there if I need it. I’ve got a Kali VM running in Windows as well just in case I want a version of Kali I can use and then reset.
The process was easy, I followed along with David Bombal’s video here↗.
A Few Issues
I did run into two issues, one that David mentioned in his video with unchecking TOP 10 and DEFAULT packages during install.
The other took a minute to figure out. tldr; Windows Defender messed up the bootable USB
Even unchecking TOP 10 and DEFAULT packages, I was getting a failure message when trying to install. The error started with An installation step failed. You can try to run the failing item again from the menu, or skip it and choose something else. The failing step is: Select and install software. Then eventually went on to describe the filesystem/partitioning throwing errors. That made me think that GRUB was possibly messed up? Missing?
I used the laptop and thus Windows to write the ISO to the USB, typically I would use my Mac for this, but I figured I would follow the video verbatim. So maybe it had something to do with the bootable USB itself?
While using Rufus to write the Kali ISO to the USB I got some warnings that there was malware on my laptop and that these were being quarantined. What? It did not occur to me until later that these were probably coming from the ISO being written and by being quarantined, they were missing from the bootable USB. Thus the missing or corrupted files were breaking all the things.
It’s embarrassing that this did not occur to me until later. Like, why did I not get clued into this while it was happening? Probably because I am not familiar with Windows Defender. Disabling Windows Defender and then writing the bootable USB a second time, without any malware warnings, did the trick. Kali installed quickly and without any issues.
