How to install BackTrack 3 or 4 to hard drive along with Windows XP, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse on Lenovo Thinkpad X60

April 21, 2009 HydTech 12 comments

From my last post you can see that I installed Fedora and openSuse to my existing dual boot Thinkpad X60 with Ubuntu and Windows. In this post, I will show you how to install BackTrack 3 to the hard drive. These instructions can also be used for BackTrack 4.

First we have to create a partition for the OS. You can only have 4 primary partitions out of which only 1 can be an extended partition. The extended partition can then in turn have multiple logical partitions. I used gparted in Ubuntu to partition my drive as follows.

Primary partition 1 – NTFS for XP
Primary partition 2 – NTFS used as storage
Primary partition 3 – extended partition which has all my linuxes for testing purposes
extended partition contains:
logical partition 1 – ext3, Fedora
logical partition 2 – ext3, openSuse
logical partition 3 – ext3, will be used for Backtrack
logical partition 4 – ext3, future linux (maybe Gentoo)
logical partition 5 – swap (I only have to use one swap for all my linuxes)
Primary partition 4 – ext3 for Ubuntu, my main linux

qtparted

Now download, burn, and boot up BackTrack 3 live cd.

My BackTrack partition is sda8 and BT3 automatically mounted it to /mnt/sda8

if not, you can mount your drive by typing:
mkdir /mnt/sda8 mount /dev/sda8 /mnt/sda8
replace sda8 with your partition

now, copy the required files from the live cd to the hard drive:
cp --preserve -R /{bin,dev,home,pentest,root,usr} /mnt/sda8/ cp --preserve -R /{boot,lib,etc,opt,sbin,var} /mnt/sda8/ mkdir /mnt/sda8/{mnt,proc,sys,tmp} mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/sda8/dev/ mount -t proc proc /mnt/sda8/proc/

The installation is done, now you can reboot and add the BackTrack to the grub menu.lst

Reboot into Ubuntu and:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

This is what my grub looks like. The part in bold is for BackTrack:

title Ubuntu Jaunty, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=da7e4aba-35c8-4ab8-a882-d5c7c324101a ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu Jaunty, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic (recovery mode)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=da7e4aba-35c8-4ab8-a882-d5c7c324101a ro single
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

title Ubuntu Jaunty, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=UUID=da7e4aba-35c8-4ab8-a882-d5c7c324101a ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic
quiet

title Ubuntu Jaunty, memtest86+
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin
quiet

### END DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST

# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian
# ones.
title Other operating systems:
root

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS
# on /dev/sda1
title Microsoft Windows XP Professional
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Fedora (2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=cae92252-724a-4e24-841d-e8c3fb24f861 rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686.img
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
#title Fedora (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686) (on /dev/sda5)
#root (hd0,4)
#kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 ro root=UUID=cae92252-724a-4e24-841d-e8c3fb24f861 rhgb quiet
#initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686.img
#boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda6.
title openSUSE 11.1 – 2.6.27.19-3.2 (on /dev/sda6)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.21-0.1-default root=/dev/sda6 splash=silent showopts vga=0×317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.21-0.1-default
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda6.
title Failsafe — openSUSE 11.1 – 2.6.27.19-3.2 (on /dev/sda6)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.21-0.1-default root=/dev/sda6 showopts ide=nodma apm=off noresume nosmp maxcpus=0 edd=off powersaved=off nohz=off highres=off processor.max_cstate=1 x11failsafe vga=0×317
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.21-0.1-default
boot

title BackTrack 3 Final KDE
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz vga=0×317 root=/dev/sda8 ro quiet splash autoexec=xconf;kdm
boot

title BackTrack 3 Final shell
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz ro root=/dev/sda8 vga=0×317
boot