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I was trying to for the first time dual boot my computer With Windows 8.1 Kali Linux

I didn't Have an Idea About What UEFI means so naturally I made a partition, then I Went to the "BIOS" menu and set things up in order to boot from USB (as I saw in tutorials, I was supposed to put the legacy mode on, and the "legacy first" option); finally the installation finished and I rebooted, there appeared the menu options to select the OS to use, so I first started Kali and saw everything was ok, but when I tried to enter in Windows , there Appeared a message saying something like "the boot configuration for your PC is missing" .....

So I panicked and I used the system restore tool, even when it finished the problem stayed the same, so I decided just as lucky choice to leave the he BIOS boot menu like it was originally. And that allowed me to use windows again, but when I tryed to enter in Kali now with the legacy mode, it shows the message "unkown filesystem grub rescue ...." , so summarizing I would really appreciate your help with this questions:

1) why did the dual boot Attempt failed?

2) Why windows and linux installer shows a different size from the same partition?

3) how can I delete the useless kali linux partition (I just don't remember which one it was) in oreder to use That space again?

4) Is there a way of making a dual boot with UEFI? how?

1 Answer 1

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I Went to the "BIOS" menu and set things up in order to boot from USB (as I saw in tutorials, I was supposed to put the legacy mode on

This was Bad Advice. By enabling BIOS/CSM/legacy mode, you greatly complicated your boot path and made it likely that you'd end up with Windows installed in EFI/UEFI mode and Linux installed in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode. Such a mixed-mode installation is difficult to manage, as you discovered. I cover this subject in much greater detail on this page, if you're interested in delving into the details.

Unless you've created personal documents in Linux, it's probably easiest at this point to start over with a fresh Linux installation. When you do, be sure you use the manual partitioning option ("Something Else" in Ubuntu, but I don't know if Kali uses that same nomenclature). There are numerous tutorials that cover how to use this option, so consult one of them to be sure you do it right. If you get in and find that your old Linux partition(s) remain intact, you can re-use them, but be sure to "reformat" the Linux filesystem partition(s). If your old Linux partition(s) have been wiped by the Windows re-installation, you'll have to shrink the Windows partition in order to make room for Linux. Do not create new partitions in Windows, though; do that in the Linux installer. (Windows sometimes messes things up when creating new partitions. These problems are rampant on MBR disks and relatively rare on GPT disks, but I recommend you play it safe.)

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