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I recently installed kali linux on my pc. Apart from using Raspberry Pis, this is really my first time using linux. My computer has two hard drives, an SSD and an HDD, windows is installed on the SSD with the HDD as just extra room for games etc. Today I decided to put linux on it.

I started by decreasing the size of the HDD partition to make a new partition for kali linux. I made a bootable USB and installed kali on to the HDD. I ran sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. The second one took not too long to download but it kept saying that it was extracting files and I left it for a while but it was still doing it so I restarted my PC hoping to get into windows. I found out then that windows was not in the boot manager which i put on the windows C drive.

Upon realising this I went back into kali only to find out when I log in I get no icons and a mostly blue screen. I don't care to much about restoring the kali install but I would be grateful if anyone could help me get my Windows back.

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To get Windows back you have to fix Windows boot manager/loader using a Windows installation/recovery USB/DVD (see how to get Windows installation USB/DVD if you don't have one).

Boot Windows DVD/USB.

  1. For MBR style disk - fix MBR using bootsect.exe

bootsect /NT60 ALL /mbr

Now independent of MBR/GPT style disk:

  1. Fix boot manager/loader

bcdboot c:\windows /s Z: /f BIOS

where c: is your Windows drive and z: is EFI System partition on GPT (Microsoft Reserved or just the active partition on MBR style disk). Option /f is either "BIOS" or "UEFI" depending on type of boot - UEFI boot is for GPT disk, BIOS boot is for MBR disk.

Hint: You can use diskpart.exe to map partitions.

NOTE: FOR FIXING UEFI/GPT BOOT YOU HAVE TO BOOT RECOVERY MEDIA THE UEFI WAY!

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