Installing on HP8440p non-UEFI dual boot Windows10

[sergio]

Hello,
I'm struggling to install Kali 2017.1 on an old HP8440p in dual boot with the existing Windows10 partition.

First point: non-UEFI vs. UEFI.
The laptop's BIOS does have a UEFI option which was NOT enabled at the time I made the first installation attempt of Kali (and was NOT enabled when I upgraded the OS from Windows 7 to Windows 10).
Actually it was never enabled and even did not know it existed or what it meant before I started experimenting with Kali.
Although I enabled the UEFI option in the BIOS setup after the first unsuccessfull installation attempts of Kali, the installations still kept failing afterwards (see below).

What I did (with UEFI Bios not enabled yet):

Main scenario (preferred as I want to avoid using Grub on the MBR)
==========================================
1) The HP8440p has a factory "TOOLS" partition (showing up in Windows as drive E which I resized in order to have 20Gb available for Kali. I could have carved out space from the main "WINDOWS" partition on C: but I decided to use "TOOLS" instead as I thought its available free space (20GB+) was a waste of storage. The physical drive is a single solid state 500Gb Crucial disk. The free space I reserved for Kali is then located approx after the 400Gb boundary on the drive, in case it matters.
2) Downloaded and imaged Kali 2017.1 to a USB drive and booted from there
3) Run the graphical installer and used the free space made available at step 1) to create three logical partitions:
a) /boot (4Gb) /dev/sda6
b) / (10 Gb) /dev/sda7
c) remaining 6Gb as swap

4) Set the Grub loader to install on /dev/sda6 (not the MBR) and finalized the installation

5) Rebooted to Windows 10

6) Used EasyBCD to configure a Windows-based dual boot menu: Win10 and Kali

7) Rebooted and selected Kali in the boot menu

8) Laptop restarts and the dreaded GRUB Minimal bash like shell appears


Alternative scenario
============
1) -3): same

4) I choose to install Grub on the MBR

5) Rebooted: the Grub boot menu appears (showing also Windows10)

6) I select Kali: the OS boots correctly! I thought I made it

7) Reboot again and select Windows10 option: Windows starts fine and I think I'm done

8) Reboot again into Kali: FAILURE!
A bunch of file system and drive related errors are displayed and I'm now in a Busybox shell.
Apparently rebooting into Windows caused something in the setup that Kali and/or Grub did not like


I also re-run the main and alternative scenario after enabling the UEFI option in BIOS with exactly the same results.

I evidently don't know what I'm doing and I'd appreciate some help.


Thanks in advance!

Sergio

[_defalt]

If your laptop is shipped with UEFI firmware but it was disabled by the proprietor then there is a possibility that your pre-installed Windows 7 was installed in MBR hard drive system. You should check it first whether partition scheme of your hard disk is GPT or MBR.

If it is MBR, then you have to install kali in Legacy BIOS because UEFI picks boot loader from separate EFI partition but your windows boot loader is present in MBR sector so you won't be able to boot windows in UEFI mode. You have to reinstall WIndows 10 if you want to boot both kali and windows in UEFI.

If it is GPT, then you don't need to install kali in Legacy BIOS though grub is capable of booting windows yet it is not recommended because your windows boot loader is in EFI and you are installing grub in MBR sector.

Most likely your hard drive has MBR partition scheme because it was come with pre-installed windows 7 which does not support UEFI and secure boot. Things might have changed now for windows 7 since the release of UEFI but in old days it was like that only.

Now, about that error you are getting when you boot kali, post the output of that error what exactly it says. You should also try to boot kali-live USB and see if it is compatible with your machine.

You don't have to use EasyBCD if you follow the above recommendations. I prefer UEFI over Legacy BIOS because UEFI supports GPT partition scheme.

[sergio]

Hi _defalt,
I'm going to close this thread because I started a different approach: I converted the partition scheme from MBR (yes, it was indeed MBR) to GPT using the MBR2GPT utility available in Windows10.
I then enabled UEFI in the BIOS and re-run the installation but I'm still having problems which I will post in a new thread unless I find a solution elsewhere in the forum.

I did run kali-live USB and it started fine, so I think my machine is compatible with kali.

Thanks
Sergio