Install bt3 on sdhc card for Asus eeepc

[purehate]

This is going to be a quick tutorial on how to install bt3 on a sdhc card on the asus eeepc.

I am assuming a few things
1. You have a small understanding of linux
2. You have a large sdhc card which does not work in your laptop card reader.
3. You have a 1 gig usb key with which to work
4. You want a save changes partition

Download the bt3 usb version. I'm assuming we are starting in windows. When it comes it will be in a rar archive. Unrar the archive and you will get a folder which contains two files. bt3 and boot.

Insert your usb key and copy the two files to the key. Open a command prompt and change into the Drive and directory of the boot folder.
for eample if your hard disk is C:\ then you need to switch to F:\ or what ever your usb drive is. Then change to the boot directory. In there is a file called bootinst.bat. Run that file and follow the 2 or 3 instructions and if all goes well you will be greeted with a message that you usb is now bootable.

If you have problems with this so far I'm not sure I can do anything for you.

Now if you were in my situation I had a 16 gig card and none of my laptop readers or crappy usb2 sd card readers would read it. So I poped it in the eeepc with the stock xandros system and it worked. Imagine my dismay when I found out that for some reason that crappy OS would not let me run the bootinst.sh file because of execute permissions even though I was root.

This is why we made the usb key. We can boot the eeepc from usb and then we will be in a familiar enviorment (at least I was) so that we can work on the sdhc card.

Okay so change the bios in the eeepc and boot your usb key into backtrack. Just choose the first kde choice (doesn't matter) and get the desktop up.

Insert your sdhc card and open a console. Now my usb was sdb and my sdhc card was sda so I'm assuming its the same for you. If not you will have to figure it out. Anyway the card will come up in /mnt/sda. Keep that in mind for later.

so next open a terminal and type

bt~#fdisk /dev/sda
(now I made my bt partiton 2 gigs in order to be able to add .lzms however if your space is limited the just do 1 gig)
now type
n
p
1
<enter>
+1024M (change this in Mb's to suit your install)
n
p
2
<enter>
<enter>
w

At this point the partition table will be written.
Ok now we need some file systems.

bt~#mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1

bt~#mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda2

Okay that was easy. Now next you want to copy the boot & bt3 folders from /mnt/sdb to /mnt/sda1

Next you want to cd in to the /mnt/sda1/boot/syslinux directory

Open the syslinux.config in a text editor and add the line

changes=/dev/sda2

I added mine first right after APPEND and before every thing else.

Now do a "cd .." back in to the boot directory and run the bootinst.sh

bt~#./bootinst.sh

If all went well you will be greeted with the same prompts as when we made the usb key and it will say sda1 is now bootable.
Now you need to make your changes directory

bt~#mkdir /mnt/sda2/changes

And now you should have....

bt~#cd /mnt/sda2
bt~#ls
xine (or something like that)
lost & found
images
changes

If you do not have these 4 directories then you have done something wrong and you need to go back and figure out what happened.

Okay so now you should power off bt3 and reboot. You will have to change your bios again to boot from sd card. If all goes well then you should be able to boot bt3 and save changes.

I'm sorry there are no screen shots or visual aids but I just did this all from memory.

[Archangel-Amael]

Now if you were in my situation I had a 16 gig card and none of my laptop readers or crappy usb2 sd card readers would read it. So I poped it in the eeepc with the stock xandros system and it worked. Imagine my dismay when I found out that for some reason that crappy OS would not let me run the bootinst.sh file because of execute permissions even though I was root.

I just want to add that through trial and error I learned that if you do not have a card reader that can handle SDHC (the high capacity) ones then you will not be able to use the card reader.
I had one that was about a year old and it would not work with HC cards.

On the flip side nice tutorial.

[triki]

Thanks for the tutorial ! Eeepc is the perfect tool for pen testing !!!

[depill]

Hi and thanks for a great tutorial.
You wrote:
[QUOTE=pureh@te;70301]
bt~#mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1
/QUOTE]

I couldn't find mkfsdos on backtrack, so I googled and found that it should be

mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1 -- Thanks man. I wrote that all from memory so thanks for the edit--pureh@te
thanks again

[twocent$]

[QUOTE=pureh@te;70301]This is going to be a quick tutorial on how to install bt3 on a sdhc card on the asus eeepc.

pureh@te, thanks for the tutorial. It worked really well. Compiz and all on a Fuji 8gb HDSD. It is amazing to have this distro running off something the size of a thumbnail!

Sorry but one small question. It may be the beer, but the drive letter assigned to the external device (be it USB or SD card) appears to have a mind of it's own on boot! This means the save changes sometimes work and sometimes don't appear on boot.

Sometimes it boots as sda and sometimes sdb! I am pretty sure its not caused by internal 'hard drive' (Kubuntu 7.10) as this is 'hdc'... I have changes partition formatted as ext3. Would ext2 help? I read somewhere that it is better because it reduces re-writes to the drive?

Have fiddled around with the syslinux.conf and the tab boot options and cannot see any logic to it. I figured it was a problem from the computer getting confused by taking out / putting in usb drives and that if I put it on an SD card and just left it in the drive all the time then it would get over it but no cigar!

Anyone else having the same problem?

Pls help. Going nuts although these kind of issues make linux seem a little more human!

Cheers

********* EDIT EXT2 HAS FIXED IT *********

[purehate]

I don't have that problem but I do find that if I boot some thing from usb and then go back to sd that I have to reset the drive order in the bios. Not sure why that is. Its true the say that ext2 is better for flash memory but I guess its a personal preference. I'm glad the tutorial helped you. I wrote it because the one person was having all this trouble and wanted one tutorial to cover it all so I whiped that up from memory in class one day and he has not even used it or made a comment so I'm glad someone one is using it

[Coniferous]

If not you will have to figure it out.

I ran

tail -f /var/log/syslog

then inserted my SD card to see what device it was.. mine was sda as well.

[imported_krymsunmortis]

Ok I know I could just leave it on my thumb drive and keep booting my EEEPC from there... but wheres the fun in that

Now I might be a gluton for punishment with this but I tried using the install from with in BT3 to install to my 16g SDHC. Figured have teh room why run from a compressed image of it when I can expand it and have a bit faster response time. now after I reboot the EEE I get

VFS: Cannot open root device "801" or unknown-block(8,1)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(8,1)

Also I was wondering is the boot menu on the live grub ? and it seems the real install uses lilo why the difference?

Also has any one though of possibly splitting their install up say part on to the SSD and part onto a SDHC say /home and /var on the SDHC this would cut back on the read/write times to the SSD that some people seem worried about.

[ghaze]

Purehate,

What kind of SD Host Controller does lspci show you have?

Mine is a Texas Instruments PCIxx12, which doesn't recognize the card (4gig sandisk SDHC). This is common with this card reader. Maybe it will work down the road with a newer kernel. I'm not sure if it's a SDHC device or not, but it doesn't recognize a 1gig SD card, either.

The card boots just fine in a usb card reader. I'm going to take it down to my brother's and try it on his laptop. Hopefully, he has a supported reader.

Thanks for the tut.

[purehate]

Ghaze thats why I made the tut. Neither one of my laptop internal card readers would recognize a sdhc card. So I made the usb real quick and then made the bt3 sdcard on the eeepc itself.

Oh I just reread your post. Are you asking what controller the eeepc has. I'll look in a sec however I've used 4 or 5 different cards in the eeepc and it has worked fine. I currently use a Adata 16 gig which is what the chaps on the asus eeepc forums recommended as the best card to boot from.