EH-Net

Alright, since this was brought up in another thread, and since it seems to be asked all over the place, I figured I'd post some instructions that work. I'll keep it pretty simple. I just downloaded the ISO of BT2 last night and installed it in VMware following these instructions which I got help with from muts and/or ziplock a while back.

Keep in mind, VMware deafults to SCSI drives, so if you're using VMware (and you don't do a custom creation) you should use 'sda.' If you have an IDE HD, you use 'hda.' I'm going to post one copy of the instructions, and I'll include what you need to do for dual boot (but who does that anymore anyway?).

In the instructions, I'll be using sda and installing BT as the only OS in a VM. All commands will be italics and dual-boot notices will be bold.

BackTrack 2 HD Installation Instructions:

Fantastic!  Thanks, Bill.

-Brian

Really helpful.
Thanks !

Thank you for the wonderful tutorial. I am looking for some tutorial on Installation of Wireless Drivers - my RH 7 installation and BT 2 installation does not detect my wireless card for nc6400.

By nc6400, I'd guess you're talking about the HP Compaq nc6400? We use HP's at work, I have an nc6220. These HP's use an intel wireless adapter that's built-in. Is that the adapter you're trying to use? I know it won't work for BT2, I'm not sure about RH (though I'd guess probably not). As far as I know, there is no work around to use that adapter. You're best off buying a separate wireless PC card. A lot of people here have recommended using the Ubiquiti card from wlanparts.com.

I was following along great until the very end... when I typed lilo -v I get the following error:

Fatal: First sector of /dev/hda1 doesn't have a valid boot signature

I know I designated it as boot when I ran fdisk, so I'm not sure what that means.

slag,

I saw your other post that you fixed the problem. I apologize, I forgot to add that into my instructions. That's been fixed, thanks.

No big deal; if it isn't working, you can't really break it. I just messed around with a ton of different stuff until I found something that worked. I do still have another question though. I'm running backtrack on an HP zv6000, and the only way I can get it to boot all the way is to disable acpi by adding the acpi=off line at boot. Is there a way to set that option as part of the default so I can disable the prompt and timeout and just boot straight into backtrack?

Lesser hassle, disabling that gives me no way to check my battery level, any suggestions on a different work around or something else I could use?

I'm just simply trying to install bt2 to the system disk.

I've verified lilo.conf and the /boot partition.

I've used the installer and manually copied the directories over as instructed, but no dice.

When rebooting lilo seems to hang. I just get "Loading BT....."

Nothing else.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

thx

slag,

I'm not too sure on that one, you may want to check the remote-exploit.org forums.

halcyon,

Did you use both the install AND manually copy over the files? If you follow the instructions I've posted, you don't use the installer. Are you sure you don't have a lilo error?

Here's my lilo file for my VM with BT2 by itself:


And here's my lilo file for dual-boot:

not to be too jerky but you could just try building your own "hack" distro on slackware/gentoo/FC/whatever.  you'll probably get more out of it than screwing with BT for days.

Hey there, i hope you don't mind replying here after 120 days from the last one but i really need to get some help with something. I have done by letter everything explained here and when rebooting the system (without the cd) i am having an error mssg

"GRUB Loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error15
_   "

Any idea of this.?

Thanks in advance ...
and sorry for bothering you with such a problem.

Cheers :)

Slackram,

looks like a Grub issue  ;)

try booting off a live CD (like the Backtrack CD you've dropped on the harddrive) and edit the Grub configuration (Google is your friend).

Alternatively try the install again, I've come a across this before and a second install fixed it without issue, don't know why.

to help you help yourself.  what does google say a grub error 15 is?

It has been a while since i asked help for this issue.
I have been solved that out, and that's why i want to share it with all theese who might step on the same problem.

At first i would like to say that before i asked your help i tried to gather all avalliable infos reqarding that issue. Google offered me a lot of infos but none helped.

So, after many tests, (edits of Grub Loader configuration, installation of other open source boot managers, formating & re formating) i decided to install Win XP on this computer (a laptop which was running with various Linux distroes for the last 5 years).
As we know Windows are very "friendly" with other OS we might have installed and they just want to "eat" every single availlable space point on our HDD's errasing everything else we have on board.

I just installed the xp's and then i tried once again to install the BT2 on that laptop.

It just worked out...

(I am delayed on replying once again because i was on a business task on an oil drill in Nigeria)

cheers and have fun...

Yup, seems to be my experience with the Backtrack HDD install in the past. Never seems to cause me a major headache though.

Thanks for the update and glad you got sorted.