I’ve had my MacBook for a bit over a year now and have only just got round to making a boot USB which works. I tried a few months ago but gave up after booting to BusyBox…

I decided to install Kali as it’s full of fun and useful programs (I’ve been asked a few times to reset passwords on laptops by forgetful friends and family). That being said this should work for most Linux distros.

I’ve had my MacBook for a bit over a year now and have only just got round to making a boot USB which works. I tried a few months ago but gave up after booting to BusyBox…

I decided to install Kali as it’s full of fun and useful programs (I’ve been asked a few times to reset passwords on laptops by forgetful friends and family). That being said this should work for most Linux distros.

The easiest approach was to treat the USB as a live CD instead of installed system.

Firstly, we locate the USB drive:
$ diskutil list

In my case it was disk2. Then we need to unmount the drive (substituting disk2 for your disk):
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Change directory into where the Linux ISO is:
$ cd path-to-linux.iso

Now we need to copy the ISO to the USB stick. The easiest (although some say slightly dangerous) way to do this is by using dd (again substituting disk2 for your disk):
$ sudo dd if=./kali-linux-1.0.9a-amd64.iso of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m

I’m unsure why dd does not give any progress updates, but it doesn’t, it’ll just sit there until it’s done. However, we can get this information by using pkill, although we don’t actually kill the process. The below will get the information every 10 seconds, change the value of sleep to suit you:
$ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO ^dd; sleep 10; done;

That’s it. Just hold option on boot and select the USB drive.

The main issue with this is that anything you do is not saved. This can be achieved using a concept of persistence; something which is available on the Kali boot menu now. I haven’t had time to investigate this but hopefully I will be able to.