Tutorial: Backtrack 3 USB boot from floppy

[zeekgenateer]

EDIT: whoops wrong forum! Sorry bout that xP.
1. Make sure your flash drive will boot up backtrack on a computer that supports booting from a usb (there are lots of tutorials on making a BT3 flash drive, use search!!!)

2. Download wakepup2 (hxxp://ww w.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?mode=attach&id=1685). This is the only wakepup download I could find. I'll look to see if there is a newer version, but let me know if you find one.

3. Extract the files.

4. While running windows you can use makedisk.bat to write the wkpup202.img to a floppy. While on linux you can use the dd command (not sure on syntax, will look up).

5. Open up your A: drive, and copy the USBFLASH file to your USB drive.

6. Open the AUTOEXEC.BAT file with your favorite text editor. Find the line towards the end that starts with LINLD.COM image=....
change

LINLD.COM image=%drv%\vmlinuz initrd=%drv%\initrd.gz "cl=%append%"

to

LINLD.COM image=%drv%\boot\vmlinuz initrd=%drv%\boot\initrd.gz cl=@APPEND

7. Make a new text document on your A: drive called APPEND (make sure it doesn't have .txt extension )

8. Add the command line options you want to affect your kernel on boot up. Minke looks like

changes=/dev/sda3 vga=0x317 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw autoexec=xconf;kdm

(just noticed it has extra initrd in append. Not sure if taking it away will affect boot, will test later)

9. Insert floppy, flash drive, and boot up. Go through everything and when it asks for acpi just hit 1. (We removed the variable for that in step 6)

Backtrack should boot as normal, just a tad slower (that could just be my crappy laptop though)

To-Do: Add more options for boot up. ie can choose from kde, flux, etc. by using a menu and a variable for what APPEND file to use.
NOTE the cl= option cannot be too long which is why i used a text file for it and it cannot contain any spaces except when in quotes ie "cl=option=xxx option2=xxx".

This is my first tutorial, any tips or tricks are welcome. Hopefully something similar was not posted elsewhere, if it was I couldn't find it. Questions? Drop a line in this thread.

[shamanvirtuel]

easier .... dos diskette ... and then the .bat located in he boot folder
it's a starter for bt from dos

[pipedream]

too bad most new laptops (and pcs) have no floppies. nice tut anyway. thnx

[zeekgenateer]

Thing is didn't know about linld until i got wakepup. (Did a lot of seraching on google). Number 2 I don't have a new laptop or the money to get one, so I'm stuck with a sony vaio (blech) til around next year. I'd love an eee pc, but the computer I'm on needs more work.

I might try making a boot choice menu so you can choose what device to save to, since my other computer has 2 sata drives so my usb is bumped back to sdc. Thing is it took me a week to find wakepup last year (when I started using bt2) and it took me 2 days to find a working download for it this time around. I don't think these tools are out there enough for newbies to find them too easily, but maybe that's cause they can blow money on a new laptop just for kicks

Oh and thanks for replies!