Thanks a lot Bill!

I followed your guide as much as possible. In some scenario's it was impossible to do so though.
qtparted didn't do as you described, so I removed the partitions with fdisk, since new ones are made afterwards. Creating the new ones didn't give any problems so it should be ok.
Copying, mounting and chroot worked fine, but then:
when I tried lilo -v, it gave me this:


I tried googling it but got back without any result.
Maybe I should wait for the EH-Net version of Backtrack. But then again, I will face problems in the future as well that won't be able to evade...
Dilemma

Now I was thinking... is it ok to ask all these questions in an introduction thread?

Thanks for the guide Manu Zacharia.
Now I downloaded the latest version of Backtrack, tried to install it with VMWare server. After hassling with the resolution (which was in 640x...), I finally managed to let it install. I followed this guide: http://www.offensive-security.com/documentation/backtrack-hd-install.pdf
When it finished installing, i rebooted the virtual machine and put boot from HDD as first in the BIOS. After saving & exit, I couldn't wait to start exploring backtrack. Problem is: Backtrack won't boot at all, not from the harddisk that is.
I couldn't find any solutions trough google, so here I am, asking for advice
Thanks in advance

Thank you all for the warm welcome


Well we've seen quite a lot, but not that in depth. We've made our first steps into Linux with Ubuntu, later with SUSE 10. Our teacher wasn't any good himself, so it came down to self study, just to be bollocked by that teacher. This took away a lot of our courage to continue with Linux. But I'm sure this can't be a problem
What we've seen in linux was DNS, mySQL, apache, vmware, ipcop, but because of the teacher we didn't see it decently. So I know what they do, and I remember some of it, but I wouldn't be able to set it up without a guide or so (which I will look up later).

On Windows platform we had an excellent teacher who taught us a lot, more than he had to. We've seen W2003 server, its functions & some applications (ISA, exchange), how to let them communicate with other computers, VPN, ...

Other than that, we've seen very basic stuff such as making network cables (not impressing but hey, it needs to be done ), (manual) subnetting, network architectures, ...

In order to succeed, we had to make a project of our own choice, ofcourse it had to be related to networking. I did mine around DMZ's and devices in DMZ's (IDS, honeypots, ..).

Hope this answered your question.

Thank you to all the rest for the useful links, I will read the articles from Craig Heffner as soon as possible.
Learn Security Online has been added to my favourites, together with EH-Net.

Something that will make it easier for me to see the bigger picture might be making a list of things to read and to do. I'll get into that today & tomorrow.

About vmware, the cpu power isn't any problem, harddisk space will be.
Question is, do ubuntu and backtrack support dualcore cpu's trough vmware?
If not, I'll set up a pc with a singlecore cpu.

Now, on to the planning!

Hello,

First of all my name is Kevin, aged 19 and living in Belgium - Europe.
I've studied and graduated in network management this year, yet I feel like I don't know enough yet. I'd like to specialize in security as it's in my eyes the most fascinating subject in a computer network.
Now after googling and browsing a lot to find a decent community, I found this website.
It looks like my thoughts were right, and I do have a lot to learn about this all.
Some of you (if not most of you) think 'oh no, another guy who wants to become a hacker', well you're right, I do want to become a security expert and hopefully build a career with it.

Since one has to begin somewhere, here are some first questions, if someone would want to answer them, that would be great!
1) I am currently using windows xp, I will get myself a new machine and install Ubuntu on it, is Ubuntu any good or are all distributions basically the same except the way they work?
2) Currently I have no programming skills whatsoever. I don't want to go off and start using tools that do everything for me, giving myself the idea that I'm doing great, so what language should I start with?
3) Are there any tutorials for complete beginners such as myself to start with on this website? I've been browsing in the tutorial forum earlier, but by the looks of it, it's directed to those that are already skilled in the world of hacking.

Hopefully I'll learn a lot in this community, as I'm eager to get started.

Regards,
Kevin