First, let’s gather our materials: we need a verified copy of the Kali Linux ISO image and a USB drive that is at least 8GB in size. If you have any antivirus software installed on your Windows machine, don’t worry it will probably flag Kali as malware or something because it contains all sorts of nifty tools for hacking and stuff. Just ignore the warnings and keep moving forward!

Now that we have our materials, let’s get started with creating a bootable USB drive using Etcher (which is a simple tool for imaging). First, plug in your USB drive and make note of which drive designator it uses when it mounts. Then launch Etcher and click “Flash from file” to select the Kali Linux ISO image you want to use. Next, choose your USB drive as the target device and hit that big ol’ “Flash!” button once everything is ready to go.

Once Etcher finishes flashing the image onto your USB drive, you can safely remove it and proceed to boot into Kali using it. This method has several advantages: it’s non-destructive (meaning it won’t mess with anything on your actual computer), portable (you can carry Kali Linux in your pocket and have it running in minutes on any available system), customizable (you can create a custom ISO image if you want to add some extra tools or tweaks), potentially persistent (if you configure things correctly, the data you collect will be saved across reboots).

If you’re using Rufus instead of Etcher, the process is pretty similar. Just plug in your USB drive and launch Rufus, then select the Kali Linux ISO image as the boot selection option (which can be done by clicking “SELECT” and choosing the appropriate file). From there, you can customize some settings like partition scheme or target system if needed, but it’s generally best to leave those alone unless you know what you’re doing.

Now that we have our bootable USB drive all set up, how to actually use it in Windows (because why not?). Depending on your motherboard and BIOS/UEFI settings, you may need to re-image the USB drive or configure it to try booting from USB first. This can be a bit tricky depending on your setup, but there are plenty of resources out there that can help guide you through the process (like this tutorial we just went over).