I have a tiny old little laptop with no cdrom, no floppy and no USB boot options. (PIII 800 era)
My only quick option for installing an OS is the built in PXE on the onboard network card. I really wanted to get BT on this thing so here is how I netbooted then installed to the hard drive. If you ever done dhcp/tftp before, it's very easy.
Overall Process:
All I did was copy the contents of the CD to a USB key, plug it into the old laptop and pxeboot the vmlinuz and initrd on the CD. The kernel/initrd is setup to mount everything it can find and search for the .mo files.
Detailed instructions:
What you need:
- Laptop with PXE boot capabilities and a USB port (1.1 is fine)
- 512 or 1GB USB memory key, or a flash memory (SD, CF, etc) and a USB reader
- Another computer (preferably something unixy) that can run DHCPD and TFTPD.
1. Download the Backtrack iso.
2. While it's downloading install and configure the dhcp server.
On Ubuntu, you can simply do:
Code:
sudo apt-get install dhcp
Once it is installed, you should be able to replace /etc/dhcpd.conf with the following. Make sure you put in the MAC address of the machine you want BT on.
Code:
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 3600;
subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.1.40 192.168.1.45;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
option routers 192.168.1.1;
option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1;
}
host old_laptop {
# OLD_LAPTOP MAC ADDRESS GOES BELOW THIS LINE
hardware ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00;
fixed-address 192.168.1.10;
option host-name "old_laptop";
filename "pxelinux.0";
}
3. Install a tftp server.
Once again, on Ubuntu:
Code:
sudo apt-get install atftpd
Edit /etc/default/atftpd.conf changing:
to
Code:
/tftpboot/backtrack
Now that you have the ISO we need to copy the contents to the /tftpboot/backtrack directory and to the USB flash memory.
Code:
sudo mkdir /mnt/bt
sudo mount -o loop /path/to/backtrackiso.iso /mnt/bt
sudo cp -pR /mnt/bt/* /tftpboot/backtrack
sudo cp -pR /mnt/bt/* /path/to/usb/mountpoint
sudo umount /mnt/bt
4. Download syslinux (contains pxelinux)
Code:
cd /tftpboot/backtrack
sudo wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-3.31.tar.bz2
sudo tar jxvf syslinux-3.31.tar.bz2
sudo cp syslinux-3.31/pxelinux.0 .
sudo mkdir pxelinux.cfg
sudo cp isolinux.cfg pxelinux.cfg/default
5. Plug the USB memory into your laptop and boot it selecting PXE or network boot.
6. Once you've successfully booted the OS, you can install as documented in the wiki.
I did this mostly from memory, so please correct any typo's I might have.
HOWTO: PXE Netboot
