How to repair boot info from Kali Linux to get Windows 10 booting again?

Question

I have a laptop in which Windows 10 war pre-installed. I made a USB stick boot of Kali Linux and tried installing it on a partition of my disk. During the process of "Installing Base System" the battery died out.

I put it on charge and when restarted it, it said "No bootable device found-- please restart the system". I plugged in the Kali Linux USB and tried to boot from it, it recognized the device and I went with the Graphical Installation process, but when it came to partition disk option I couldn't see no partitioned disk but just the main hard disk whose "FREE SPACE" was written over there (and the whole disk was empty, what happened to my files?). I had no other option then to install it there only.

After Kali got installed completely, I open up File System and could see these files

Is there any way that I can get my files and Windows 10 back? I want dual boot of Windows 10 and Kali Linux. I need step by step guidance.

Answer 1

When the laptop battery died while Kali Linux was installing the GPT partition table was likely corrupted. This means that the files are still on the hard disk of your computer but the computer doesn't know how to access them anymore. There was a chance to install to recreate that partition table when the hard drive wasn't written to but when you installed Kali Linux for the second time on the hard drive some data of Windows was likely overwritten and with that impossible to restore. You can use data recovery software like testdisk and PhotoRec from Kali Linux on a usb stick to try and recover some of the data from the lost Windows install. After that you can do a clean install (full disk wipe) of Windows 10 and dual boot with Kali Linux. The filesystem you are currently seeing from Kali Linux (you photo) is the filesystem of Kali Linux and does not contain any data from the previous Windows install.