Kali Linux fails to boot

[Raskyy]

The other day I started using kali on a Live usb. I decided to go to a graphical install I have a hard drive that is split into two sections data and C. I thought i could have both windows and kali and do a duel boot so I started to install to Data. Nothing went wrong on the install in till I reboot. I went into bios to see if my harddrive was still there and surely it wasn't. I tried to boot from a drive labeled "ST93225AS" just a black screen pops up blinking a - symbol. My other harddrive does not appear. I installed grub thinking i could put windows on later and add it to grub. TIFU Any suggestions?

[JamesL]

It's difficult to say without knowing more about your hardware setup and partition map.

I'm sure you've checked that Kali will run, but it is an off brand flavor of debian so to speak so expect hiccups and a lot of work like regular debian. Even advances users bang their heads against the wall trying to get their hardware to work the way they wan.

So, fire up your install again in text mode (which I prefer) and write down the partition map again. On your main partition that you want to install on there should be two flags when you look at it: a B for bootable and a / for root folder. Try manually wiping, formatting to ext4 and bootable with / on that partition with the size you want. I recommend at least 40gb for Kali. Don't forget to set up a swap space with double your ram size. So look at around 80 as a bare minimum for this system. Remember, wordlists, cuda, etc... are big programs and files so if you don't have the space, look into a usb3 external formatted to anything other than fat and NTFS.

If it's still giving you grief, check to see if you have uefi boot enabled in your bios. This has caused headaches for me with Debian installs in the past.

But if you can, since this is the time to practice, install and reinstall to get used to the text install and how you system is founded. If you're into this seriously, you'll be building tablets and devices and should know every stage an OS goes through. Try, fail, read, learn. Should be the Debian motto...