Can I put the .iso file on hard drive, and will it boot? Or .iso files to hard drive?

[rowebil]

I have a laptop that doesn't boot ffrom USB nor has a DVD drive.
So, I used unebootin to put on USB, then I put those files on my hard drive.
I boot from BT3 live cd, then put in USB and cleared my hard drive, and put the files from USB to hard drive.
-/dev/hda1
boot/
casper/
documents/
boot.catalog
ldlinux
md5sum
syslinux
ubnfilel
ubninit
ubnkem
ubnpathl.txt
vesamenu.c32

Those are on my hard drive.
Will that boot up?
Or can I take the -

/boot/
/casper/
boot.catalog

files and folders, and put them on a hard drive? Those are from the .iso file.

Or can I take the plain .iso file, and transfer it to the hard drive, then boot?

Which one can I do?

Please help, thanks

[salmon86]

you need to set the mbr on the hdd to boot the files you copied
look for tutorials on grub they should point you in the right direction

[rowebil]

I don't have any other OS on the hard drive.

Can you find a tutorial on grub for me? I don't know what I'm looking for.
What should I google?

EDIT:
I actually went into that file an hour ago, but I don't know what to change.

[salmon86]

Since your booting from the live usb you should have access to the install.sh on your desktop which will install bt4 and set the mbr for you

[rowebil]

I'm not booting from the USB. My bios won't allow that. So, im basically trying to boot the live cd off the hard drive to access install.sh.

I'm not booting from the USB. My bios won't allow that. So, im basically trying to boot the live cd off the hard drive to access install.sh.

EDIT:
Do you think I can use unetbootin, like the tutorial on here was used on XP?
I can put unebooting, and the .iso file on my USB. Then boot up live cd bt3, then open unetbootin, select my .iso file, then select my hard drive?

Sorry for double posting.

[salmon86]

yeah ignore that.


stumped for the moment..


your method should work in theory.... just try it... you cant trash the drive since there is nothing to trash.

[rowebil]

Would I have to do the MBR after using unetbootin and .iso to my hard drive?

[Citruspers]

Have you considered a network boot? It solved my problems with an old laptop without a DVD drive or USB boot capabilities. There's some tutorials available.

[rowebil]

I installed it my way, now my only problem is that when boot it shows L 99 99 99 99 99... (99)repeats.

Have you considered a network boot? It solved my problems with an old laptop without a DVD drive or USB boot capabilities. There's some tutorials available.

I do not have any internel network cards or anything. Only Netgear WG511, netgear GA11 and Realtek 8185.

[lupin]

What you want to do will be fairly challenging but it can be done. However, unless you're willing to learn a lot about hard drives, and the Linux boot process, Id suggest you look into buying a DVD drive.

There's no step by step tutorial for this, so you will have to do most of the work yourself. Here's the general theory:

Two links:
http://www.offensive-security.com/do...bt4install.pdf
BackTrack Information Security Distribution » Customising the BackTrack 4 PreFinal ISO

The Backtrack 4 Beta Hard Drive installation guide above gives a number of steps that can be used to manually install BackTrack 4 to a hard drive. The customising post on the Offensive Security blog talks about how you can gain access to the contents of the squash fs BackTrack filesystem from the DVD.

The contents of the squash fs image is what you want to copy to your hard drive. You have to combine the techniques from the two different guides.

You will need to perform this task using a CD based Linux bootable environment. You will need a storage device that can be accessed from this CD based Linux environment, which can be used to store the extracted contents of the squash fs image from the BackTrack 4 DVD.

The biggest problem you will face is finding a Linux environment other than BackTrack 4 Prefinal that can mount the squash fs image - it uses a version of squash fs that isnt supported by many kernels.

If you have another system that can boot BT4 prefinal, you can use that system to extract the contents of the squash fs filesystem to a removable USB device, then mount that USB device on your target system, boot from a Linux CD and partition the target hard drive, copy the BackTrack 4 prefinal system files over (and create the /dev directory), and install a bootloader.

If you dont have access to another system that can boot BT4 prefinal, you will need to find some CD based Linux system that supports squashfs v4 (I think). Check for very new Linux boot CDs.