dont bother dual booting Kali...

[Saulokillo11]

I have tried dual booting Kali many times, tried EVERY method at least 3 times, its left my HDD, inoperable twice, resulting in the loss of data, the downloads are always different sizes and never match, the installation setup if horribly lacking detail, and there us no support of fixes and errors from official Kali members. backtrack was never this bad!

[g0tmi1k]

If the files that you downloaded, didn't match the SHA1 checksums listed on the website - then theres an issue before you even start (there’s a couple of reasons why this can happen).
To fix it, you may wish to use a different mirror to download from:
* http://cdimage.kali.org/ <--- this will detected the closes one based on your GeoIP.
* However, if you want to specify which one to use, you can see the list here: http://http.kali.org/README.mirrorlist
** In the URL rather than it ending "/kali/README" replace it with "/kali-images/"
...else use torrents.

If your having issues dual booting Kali, you may be better using a virtual machine. Both Virtualbox & VMware player are free.
Note, there’s even a pre-made/pre-installed VM for VMware.
I personally use Kali always in a VM - as I don't have a need for it to have direct access to the hardware.

The documentation is a quick basic guide to get things going - it’s not a complete handholding guide.
For the record, Kali Linux isn't designed for people who are starting out with Linux/have limited knowledge.
If you wish for another tutorial/guide on it - there are a few on this forum, as well as many people's personal blogs.

People can only give our help if:
1.) Someone knows the answer in the first place, and/or
2.) the person who is asking for help gives enough detail (such as error messages, links to which guides they followed, what steps they tried, log files. See here)

• Kali version (KDE/GNOME, Arhitecture)
• Kali installation (VM, HDD, USB)
• Basic output of commands (ifconfig, iwconfig, lspci, lsusb, dmesg, etc.)
• An error message (if any)
• Links to the same problem (if any)
• Solutions tried and their result

For people to help you, you need to help them first.
They only know what you tell them (as everyone setup is different)

... and its also generally good IT skills to have a backup solution in place.
Especially when doing lower level stuff, such as re-installing OSs

[thepoor]

Saulokillo11,

I have no problem at all with my system, I've it Quadruple boot (winXP, Win7,Backtrack, and Kali). You have to boot into LiveCD first and partition your HDD into two separate partition (if you already have windows OS installed on the whole HDD...make sure you resize windows partition first then create a new partition for Kali on that newly created partition. Then reboot and and install Kali Graphical...make sure you manually select the partition. Make sure you install grub when it asks.

[Flipper]

I totally disagree! I have dual booted kali on four separate computers, and reinstalled gnome, and lxde kali on two of those laptops. I have installed kali on one computer in particular many times over, because I'm constantly changing linux distros and eventually come back to kali. Kali has never been the issue. The only time I had a problem was when I was running a computer with UEFI, and even then, after changing to legacy boot, and then running a grub update, I could then boot into kali. Kali is the best linux distro I have ever used!

Oh, and at one time I was running a triple boot with windows 7, ubuntu, and kali linux

[Saulokillo11]

its too late now... I've now got to wipe my HDD and reinstall windows all over again -.-

[Netspook]

Why bother with windows at all?

[undersc0re]

I had problems setting up the dual boot system with windows already installed, I tried twice that way, with just the original partition. Finally the last time I gave it a shot by cleaning off the hard drive and then making 3 partitions on it before installling windows7 and kali, everything went smooth!

[ST1]

I had a lot of problems installing also, making sure partitions were fully formatted seemed to make the difference for me.

[Resistor]

No problems at all dual booting Mint and Kali.

[ROCKTUX88]

No problems at all dual booting Mint and Kali.

EWWWWWWWWWWW mint :O -_---__-_--__-__- ..... get ubuntu

[blackMORE]

Absolutely no issue with installing Kali. Download was problematic few months back (until December 2013), starting Jan 2014, no issue and Kali repo seems a lot faster.

However, saying all that, I tend to agree BT never had these issues, but Kali as we all know is still under heavy development and bug fix state (1.0.6 is VERY stable though). I'm yet to find anything that will not work in Kali or can't be fixed. (at least things that I use).

I always download with Torrent, check SHA value and burn into a DVD. I have 8 personal installation of Kali that includes 4 VM's, 4 physical's. All physical's are dual or triple boot (Kali, Windows 7, Linux Mint, Arch Linux ... mix matched depending on what I'm doing). There's 16 more installation of Kali where I'm at for other people, all stable. That makes 24 installations in total(not counting if others got VM's running as well). If you have constant issue, why not try VM first, then move onto physical's? g0tm1lk's comments are most accurate and wise.

[mmusket33]

May we ask what you are dual booting ie XP/Kali Win7/Kali. Our Team never has any problems with the XP side of a dual boot. When Kali stops doing what we want we simply use fixmbr downloaded from the net, restore the XP boot system, remove the Kali partition with Acronis run up a peristent usb install of Kali and reinstall to the HD. We admit we do not dare use 1.06 due all the bad reports so we loaded 1.05 and updated only. But what we want to function works fine.
Kali is still a child crawling out of infancy so give the developers some time to work thru the problems.

[polyphemus]

I had similar problems. My grub loader randomly was erased, then i had a "hidden" partition somewhere out there. I tried to reinstall the grub bootloader, tried to use gparted, ended up losing data. I dont think any of this is really kali's fault, but the instructions are terrible. And because of the way I upgraded to win8.1 (win7 plus win8 upgrade) I have to go through that long process every time. Eventually I ended up with so many boot errors stating I had bad sectors and unrecognizable partitions, I gave up, and forked out the money for a new HDD. My way ahead is to use a dedicated harddrive for my multiboots so my primary boot is safe haha. (I understand it's really just some config that were pointing to the wrong place, but all that troubleshooting caused me to really screw up my stuff). Bottom line, needs better documentation (a central document, not the internet-document) and a better guide.

[cyrano]

Get at least a spare HD when experimenting with OS'es. Any OS. I've installed Kali a dozen times in the last few months and if something goes awry, it's usally because of the hardware. When hardware is confused before the OS starts, anything can and will happen.

Or get a second system (even a Raspberry Pi) when doing someting of the nature of Kali. As a beginner, you don't want to ruin your only human connection to the internet. I was very pleased with general performance on the Pi, but I don't use a gui, so ymmv. A second system is priceless when it comes to studying networks.

Then, start learning. This isn't a Wifi cracking appliance. It's a whole new world.

[Rocketballz]

I have tried dual booting Kali many times, tried EVERY method at least 3 times, its left my HDD, inoperable twice, resulting in the loss of data, the downloads are always different sizes and never match, the installation setup if horribly lacking detail, and there us no support of fixes and errors from official Kali members. backtrack was never this bad!

I couldn't agree more! I swear to god getting the mirrors to download is a pain in the ***. Then installing grub...that works about 5 percent of the time. Backtrack was such smooth, easy install. This is ridiculous.

[majickmann]

I have tried dual booting Kali many times, tried EVERY method at least 3 times, its left my HDD, inoperable twice, resulting in the loss of data, the downloads are always different sizes and never match, the installation setup if horribly lacking detail, and there us no support of fixes and errors from official Kali members. backtrack was never this bad!

Yes, well this doesn't tell us much about the problem, but it does tell us a lot about you. You have no question, just a rant showing everyone viewing this post your poor skills. You actually make changes to your computer without any backups. You don't document your install steps or error messages. Your later reply also demonstrates you don't really want help, just "blowing off steam". Of course, there is another possible motive for your post... but I give you the benefit of doubt.

[elcid]

I went through a ton of issues dual booting kali on a macbook pro so I understand your frustration. I finally got it to work using this method. https://forums.kali.org/showthread.p...on-Macbook-Pro Maybe same theory will apply. In short. Install rEFIt, install Kali using LiveCD, install SuperGrubDisk2. Hope this helps.

[slim76]

I'm dual booting Kali-106-64bit and windows 7 without any issue's.
The only issue I had was creating a Kali USB, I tried several methods before I got it working.

It would be nice if the member or moderator could change the thread title as this one is misleading and rather insulting to the kali team.

[sandman]

No problems on this end.

[Xeper]

I seem to have strange problem that fit into this category. I have win7/kali dual boot using kali boot loader. Normally I have the standard boot options, but after a recent kali update I have 2 versions of kali to boot from and i don't understand why. Any reason for this? How to fix it?

[g0tmi1k]

I seem to have strange problem that fit into this category. I have win7/kali dual boot using kali boot loader. Normally I have the standard boot options, but after a recent kali update I have 2 versions of kali to boot from and i don't understand why. Any reason for this? How to fix it?

My guess would be two different kernel versions.
To remove them, you can either remove the GRUB entries (and hide the older versions), or you can just remove the old versions.

A clean 1.0.7 install looks like:

root@kali~$ dpkg --list | grep linux-image
ii  linux-image-3.14-kali1-amd64                                3.14.4-1kali1                      amd64        Linux 3.14 for 64-bit PCs
ii  linux-image-amd64                                           3.14+57+kali1                      amd64        Linux for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)
root@kali~$

[Silus]

I have tried dual booting Kali many times, tried EVERY method at least 3 times, its left my HDD, inoperable twice, resulting in the loss of data, the downloads are always different sizes and never match, the installation setup if horribly lacking detail, and there us no support of fixes and errors from official Kali members. backtrack was never this bad!

Defeatist attitude gets you nowhere, and I know it's stressful I nearly rendered my mothers laptop a paperweight but managed to sort the partitions with cd clean and fixed grub. Grub was the main issue especially as I hadn't had uch exposure to Linux, and you always find yourself trying things for yourself. That's what it's all about friend.
Don't know why it wont work for you details would be nice? What aspect of it does not work? Are you setting up the partitions properly? What are you trying to dualboot with? Win 7 or 8? Too many factors you probably just ignored due to you spitting the dummy, but hang in there man, I'm new to this and everything's going well