Dual boot Kali/Windows 7 mbr UEFI in Legacy, no EFI boot partition
Hello Everyone,
I've been pulling my hair out with a problem for the last couple days, and after a vast amount of research/googling/tinkering/cursing I'm humbly approaching the good people of this forum for help.
Let's get right into the details:
I picked up an Asus X551MAV POS laptop for the price of $170. Preinstalled with windows 8 for about 10 minutes. Promptly removed 8 and installed win7, but realized soon after that the HDD had been partition in GPT format(god knows why this is necessary on a 500gb drive?). This presented a problem for reasons that I will not go into, so I used diskpart to clean the partition and reformat to MBR, reinstalled win7 again, and all was well in the universe.
My next task was to dual boot Kali on this crapbook, which is really the only reason I purchased it(it has a wireless chipset that works out of box with kali!). I thought this would be easy because I've done it a few times before on other machines with little to no drama, I was wrong.
I first started out by shrinking the windows partition and allowing for around 40GB free space for my kali install. I then set up my kali 64 bit live bootable usb drive. I was able to boot kali live with no problem and I went with the graphical install on the main screen. Everything went fine, but after I had created the partitions for kali I received a message that no "EFI boot partition" was present. I ignored this message and proceeded on with the install. Install completed with no errors(that I saw). Quickly I realized that only Windows 7 would boot and I was not getting a Grub menu. I tried several different things, including trying to manually boot the kali partition from the bios. Nothing worked.
At this point I started researching and found that I needed to create or select an EFI partition to install grub. I also came to learn that my bios was UEFI. (I had no previous knowledge this technology and quickly realized that it was probably going to equate to nothing more than a pain in my ****. That being said I had the bios set to boot in legacy/CSM mode, so I guess technically it is suppose to function as if it were a regular bios. I also read an article which stated that while installing kali I needed to select the EFI partition and specify "do not use." Well since I did not have a EFI partition I also found that I could create an EFI boot partition, so I went through the process of installing, but this time I first created a primary EFI boot partition and then created the logical partitions. Once again the install went fine with no errors. Here's the article that I followed: http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/01/14/how...uefi-firmware/
At this point I found that GRUB was indeed booting, however the only options were to boot kali. I read that this could be fixed later in the /etc/grub.d/40_custom file, so I booted kali and made suggested changes to the file:
:menuentry "Windows 7" {
set root=(hd0,mbr1)
chainloader /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
}
I then ran update-grub. I didn't see it detect anything with windows, but I went ahead and rebooted and found that win7 was now on the boot menu, but didn't actually do anything. After struggling for a few hours more to see if I could get it to work, I gave update and used the windows recovery to erase the partitions with kali on them including the EFI boot partition. At this point I could at lease get windows booting again. I used this resource: https://forums.kali.org/showthread.p...all-Kali-Linux
So here I am with around 12 hours less life in me and still not a working dual boot with Kali. My brain is starting to hurt trying to understand this problem. After further research I have found that my problem likely has something to do with this UEFI business, though I cannot be sure. I would much rather be focusing on my python programming edumacation, than fighting the tool.
I hope I have provided enough information here to get some much needed help from someone on here...
