Installing BackTrack 2.0 on VM
BackTrack (previously SecurityAuditor) is without discussion one of the coolest and helpfull IT Security Auditing Toolset ever. This live linux distribution can be regularly installed on a harddrive but there are small detailes which are on other hand very important to successfully install version 2.0 of this system.
First attempt to install BackTrack 2.0 on my Virtual Machine (VM) harddrive without any additional information failed in spite of right generic procedures for installation was applied.
I tried to investigate where can be a problem since I used these general steps:
- Partitioning (cfdisk used to create 2 primary partitions: sda1 Linux bootable and sda2 Swap)
- Formatting (mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1, mkswap /dev/sda2)
- Mounting (mkdir /mnt/backtrack, mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/backtrack)
- Switching to X-windows (startx)
- Running BackTrack 2.0 GUI Installer (K » System » BackTrack Installer)
- Patienly waiting
- Rebooting
- Result: SHIT /* black screen */
Based on the Result (item 8. above) I booted up VM again but from Live CD. I checked how installation was done (df -h) and found everything fine. So, the problem must be in boot process. I opened /etc/lilo.conf and checked the content but everything looked OK.
I didn’t have time to investigate this mystery for following couple of hours so I asked uncle Google for some info. I found generic document from BackTrack author team, describing whole installation process of BackTrack 2.0 step by step. Nothing easier then to follow that! I did exactly all written there and was keen to see new installation working. But how big was my disappointment when I saw very known step No. 8 from my own procedure?!
I was thinking where can be a problem, when suddenly I realized that /boot partition is empty – nothing has been copied there! This seemed to be a breakpoint. I immediately copied /boot directory from BackTrack 2.0 Live CD to /tmp/boot mount point and run GUI Installer again. Rebooting… Heart beating… and… Olaaaa! BackTrack 2.0 correctly booted from HDD!
So, here is the BackTrack 2.0 Installation procedure with one very important item added:
- Partitioning (50M: sda1 as Linux bootable, 512M: sda2 as Linux Swap, rest of disk: sda3 as Linux)
- Formatting (mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda1, mkswap /dev/sda2, mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sda3)
- Mounting (mkdir /tmp/boot, mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/boot/, mkdir /tmp/bt2, mount /dev/sda3 /tmp/bt2)
- Copying boot section (cp -R /boot/* /tmp/boot)
- Switching to X-windows (startx)
- Running BackTrack 2.0 GUI Installer (K » System » BackTrack Installer, Source leave empty!)
- Patienly waiting (80% of copy process seems to be an installation jam, but it isn’t!)
- Rebooting
- Be happy!
I hope this my experience saves your time which you can spend more efficiently than investigating BackTrack 2.0 installation failures.
Tags: *nix, backtrack, installation