As I said in the title, I have a mid-2014 Macbook Air which is currently dual booting Mac OS X and Linux Mint through rEFIt. I am currently trying to live boot Kali Linux through a USB disk. I am not planning to install it, only to use it from the USB as I won't be using it often. I created a live disk through the USB Image Writer, but when I restart my computer I am met with three options:

BOOTX64.efi, which takes an infinite amount of time to load (tried it overnight, was still 'starting BOOTX64.efi'

syslinux.efi, which has the same problem as above.

Legacy OS, which returns the error 'This is not a bootable disk.' even though it is in fact a bootable disk.

I have tried checking the sha1sum for errors. It all checks out, so no corruptions or anything.

What do I do?

Have you tried re-writing the image, or drive another USB drive? Perhaps something went wrong during the write, or the USB drive is bad.

I've had a few hit or miss experiences with various Linux and EFI from USB. If nothing else works, perhaps the culprit is something wrong in Kali's files.

I thought that it's probably just Kali as well, so I'm currently downloading Backtrack and will report back as to whether or not it works. If not, I'll try a different USB.

Tried to install Backtrack with even less results than with Kali. After creating the live USB and restarting the computer, the USB did not show up at all in the list of bootable drives. I've given up on Backtrack. I'll focus on Kali for now.

I've tried rewriting and reformatting the image, but to no avail. I've written it as FAT32 and EXT4 and neither work.

I'm almost certain the problem does not lie in the USB, as I used the USB previously to boot and install Linux Mint.

Perhaps the problem lies in the USB Image Writer in Mint?

Any response is greatly appreciated.

If you're using Mint, why not just use the standard tools to write the data to the USB drive?

- Plug in the USB drive, run dmesg to find out the device file (usually sdx where x will be any letter). Look for a manufacturer and/or model name to be sure. You must get this right for the next step as data on the device will be overwritten.
- Write the data to the USB drive, as root. Replace sdx with the info you got from dmesg.

Just tried. Seemed to be working (took multiple minutes to burn) but when I rebooted it, rEFIt labeled it as "Boot Legacy OS from HD" and after selecting it I was met with a blinking underscore on a black screen. Received the same result after writing the disk through unetbootin. Boot through Virtual Box also failed.

I read somewhere that it could be a graphics card problem. My card is Intel HD Graphics 5000.

Thanks.

Damn, sorry you're having such luck.

They've had some issues in the kernel lately, but their graphics support is usually pretty good.

I don't know if Kali uses a splash screen. Can you edit the boot line? If they exist, remove "quiet" and "splash", and see if there's any output.

Fixed!

Found the answer here: http://forums.kali.org/showthread.ph...all-Kali-Linux

Thanks!