Study guide
6.2 Step-by-Step Installation on a Hard Drive
Kali Linux Certified Professional KLCP
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1 Introduction & Exam Overview
1.1 Current Exam Facts 1.2 How to Use This Guide & Study Strategy 1.3 PEN-103 Syllabus & Study Path
2 About Kali Linux
2.1 A Bit of History: From BackTrack to Kali 2.2 Kali's Relationship with Debian 2.3 Purpose and Use Cases 2.4 Main Features and Design Policies
3 Getting Started with Kali Linux
3.1 Downloading and Verifying a Kali ISO 3.2 Booting Kali in Live Mode 3.3 Installation Options Overview 3.4 Troubleshooting Installations
4 Linux Fundamentals
4.1 What Linux Is and What It Does 4.2 The Command Line 4.3 The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 4.4 Useful Commands: Files, Search, Environment
5 Permissions and Process Management
5.1 File Permissions and Ownership 5.2 Managing Processes 5.3 Shells, Variables, and the Environment
6 Installing Kali Linux
6.1 Minimal Installation Requirements 6.2 Step-by-Step Installation on a Hard Drive 6.3 Unattended Installations with Preseeding 6.4 ARM Installations
7 Configuring the Network, Users, and SSH
7.1 Configuring the Network 7.2 Managing Unix Users and Groups 7.3 Configuring SSH
8 Configuring Services
8.1 Apache Web Server 8.2 PostgreSQL Database 8.3 Managing Services with systemd
9 Helping Yourself and Getting Help
9.1 Documentation Sources 9.2 Kali Linux Communities 9.3 Filing Good Bug Reports
10 Security Policy and Network Services
10.1 Defining a Security Policy 10.2 Possible Security Measures 10.3 Securing Network Services
11 Firewalling and Monitoring
11.1 Netfilter and iptables Behavior 11.2 Writing iptables Rules and NAT 11.3 Monitoring and Logging
12 Debian Package Management: APT
12.1 Introduction to APT 12.2 The sources.list File 12.3 Kali Repositories 12.4 Basic Package Interaction with apt
13 dpkg and Advanced Package Management
13.1 dpkg Fundamentals 13.2 Inspecting .deb Files and Package State 13.3 Maintainer Scripts and Conffiles 13.4 APT Pinning and Package Authenticity
14 Advanced Usage
14.1 Modifying and Rebuilding Kali Packages 14.2 Recompiling the Kernel 14.3 Building Custom Kali Live ISO Images 14.4 USB Persistence with LUKS Encryption
15 Kali Linux in the Enterprise
15.1 Network Installation with PXE Boot 15.2 Configuration Management with SaltStack 15.3 Metapackages and Custom Repositories 15.4 Configuration Packages and Forking
16 Introduction to Security Assessments
16.1 Kali Linux in an Assessment 16.2 Types of Assessments 16.3 Types of Attacks 16.4 Formalization and the Road Ahead
6.2 Step-by-Step Installation on a Hard Drive
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
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
Last updated: July 2026
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 — kali is 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.