Installing Kali2 on an HP Zbook 17

The other day I had to install Kali2 on an HP Zbook 17. Usually it goes without any problems but this one was a harder nut to crack. I usually do the install a couple of times, just to make sure that the process is repeatable for my colleagues if they need to repeat it.

After it got installed sometimes the computer completely froze up. When I tried to shut it down it froze systematically. The problem was thus that troubleshooting was a pain since sometimes it froze.

The solution was actually simple (but usually things are once you have figured it out). At boot you make the boot loader go and boot in recovery mode. I got greeted by a shell instead of the GUI and for some reason I tried immediately to shutdown and that worked without any problem so the actual problem had to do with the GUI.

I restarted the system and I looked at my dmesg output. Hidden in between all other lines, it said acpi had issues. The solution was to edit /etc/default/grub and add to the value for GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT the bootoption acpi=off.

To make the changes work the magic word is sudo update-grub and reboot the computer.

After the reboot I got the message "A start job is running for dev-disk-by (...)". The issue was pretty well documented in this blogpost. It is was caused by the swap not having the correct UUID, by simply looking it up with lsblk -f and manually correcting /etc/fstab all problems are gone and the machine runs smoothly.