dual boot kali 1.1.0/windows 8.1 hp pavilion touch smart

Hi everyone, I know there are about a million of these threads but have scoured everywhere and tried everything and just can't get the kali live usb to boot from restart on my laptop!

First I tried using win32 disk imager to create the usb, I changed the boot order in the bios and nothing happened, just booted windows. I tried disabling secure boot as well as enabling legacy boot and just about every combination of bios settings I could imagine but still nothing.

I've tried several tools, all with the same effect. I tried using a tool called rufus, which indicated that the ISO might be corrupt, so I downloaded a new ISO and built a new installer, that didn't work. I read on a forum that for UEFI systems, you need to create a GPT partition rather than an MBR one, which rufus allows you to do, so I tried that but received an error which said that EFI was unsupported on the ISO, which I don't think should be the case.

Have been running kali on virtualbox up to now but it is a little restrictive.

Really stuck with this, feel it must be something to do with my laptop rather than the usb but could be wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

***** Edit

I managed to boot from the usb by using rufus then unzipping the efi.img in the boot folder and extracting the EFI folder to the root of the pen drive, then enabling legacy boot in the bios.

Carried on installing on the partition I'd made in windows disk management until a reboot was needed. I installed easybcd as a boot manager and configured the boot menu with kali as a new entry, then restarted.

The menu appeared, but when I chose kali to complete the installation, I got the error message "windows failed to start". Think it may be an issue with the bootloader in kali, I seem to be making very painful progress though slowly!

I decided to format the partition in windows disk management and start again, I booted from usb again and went through the kali installation creating boot, home, swap and user partitions. I was expecting to see an option about where to install grub, and there I was going to enter the partition number corresponding to the boot partition I'd just created, but the installation went ahead automatically.

I think it may be something to do with the efi partitions created by linux the first time I tried to install? I tried deleting them but can't through disk management, and diskpart sees the entire drive as one which would mean formatting it to get rid of them (which I was hoping I wouldn't have to do!).

Any idea why the installation would carry on without giving the option of where to install the bootloader?

I get the feeling this isn't meant to be easy!

Thanks