bt4 r2 hangs at startup

[robknc]

Hi,

Apologies if this has been previously asked (I was unable to find anything by searching the forums here or via Google).

First let me describe what I am using..
1. BackTrack 4(r2) ISO extracted to root of an all-in-one flash drive
2. All-in-one drive uses grub4dos already
3. menu.lst entries in existing grub4dos were copied from the menu.lst on the ISO
4. Have tried booting from a Lenovo T500 and an Acer VM410 quad core box

I am having issues with the system hanging upon startup. In any boot option but forensics the system hangs at "Loading, please wait..."

In the forensics boot mode I can see that it appears to hang at:
squashfs: version 4.0 (2009/01/31) Phillip Lougher
aufs 2-standalone.tree-35-20100823

If I press CTRL-X and then ENTER (with any of the predefined boot options) then it pushes past this point and brings me to a shell (where I can enable networking, startx, etc without issue). I can't really see anything missing or non-functional because of this, but I would like to see it boot without user interaction if possible.

Any ideas? I think the next logical step would be to burn and boot from the DVD to see if the issue occurs from there on the same systems, but I have a sinking suspicion it has more to do with attempting to boot this from a flash drive or a compatibility problem. I also attempted to install BT4 to a flash drive, so that I could move the files over to my main stick, but I gave up at 6gb -- don't have that much space to dedicate to BT



Thanks in advance,
Rob

[Citruspers]

I would just try booting the LiveDVD first, but you could also try the "Universal USB Installer" to install backtrack to your USB stick. I believe 1 GB is enough.

[Barry]

Unetbootin.

[robknc]

Thanks for the replies gents.

I tried the universal installer to load it on the stick, it was listing ~6.5gb of disk usage 70% through the process. UNetbootin would be great, if I only wanted to run one distro off the drive

The goal is to have backtrack on the same drive as:
1. Knoppix
2. UBCD4WIN
3. UBCD (dos)
4. AVG Rescue CD
5. Offline NT PW/REG Editor
6. DBAN
7. NTFS4DOS
8. FreeDOS

The ISO boot won't work with BT4. The furthest I've gotten with this so far is by extracting the files to the root of the drive (with their original paths). And duplicating the grub entries. I tried bt4 r1 and get the same results as r2.

I'm 99% sure that it has to do with the way it's being booted, I'm just wondering if there isn't a kernel parameter or a customization I can make to get this all working. Does anyone have any other suggestions as to how I can get the CD or files within the CD to start from a USB stick with grub4dos?


Thanks!
Rob

[dec1bel]

You can use Unetbootin to boot multiple distros.

I've rolled my own multi-boot flash drive with MultiCD but it's too much for me to keep them up-to-date all the time so I've opted for solutions like Katana. For being able to make your own MultiCD wasn't too bad.

[killadaninja]

What does your grub4dos entry look like?

[robknc]

Ok, I have done some troubleshooting on this and have figured out the cause of my issues. I'm not sure how I can fix the problem, but at least I have figured it out and can reproduce it. This issue occurs with grub4dos and syslinux and doesn't appear to be related to the mbr/loader.

So I was trying to do a multiboot cd, and this was the only issue I had once I was finished putting everything together. I figured it was something that I was doing, so I went and grabbed Katana per dec1bel's suggestion... but ended up in the same boat.

So Katana uses 4r1, and it booted with zero issues out of the box. Once I had added ubcd4win (which I had to write an updated howto on (posted in katana forums)), the avg2011 rescue cd, Knoppix, and a Windows 7 AIO cd, it started showing the same symptoms as the multiboot that I had put together on my own. This round I used syslinux instead of grub4dos, since that's what Katana is distributed with.

So I sat down and stripped out tools one by one until I found the culprit - the Windows7 installation disc (disc extracted to root of usb). I started pulling files/folders one at a time until I nailed it down to an individual folder that seems to be the culprit - SOURCES. The strangest part is that I started removing all the folder contents within Sources to attempt to narrow further (the 3.5gb WIM image is in there) and the issue occured with nothing inside of the sources folder on the root of the drive. The mere existence of the SOURCES folder on the root of the drive is the cause, just to double check I removed the whole folder, verified bt4 booted, and then created a new folder called sources - issue occurred upon restart.

So anyway, to recreate this "ctrl-x and then enter to boot" issue, create an empty folder on the root of the flash drive (or possibly installation media (cd)?) called SOURCES. I am absolutely clueless on how to resolve this and think I may just have to live with it and press ctrl-x [enter]. Modification of the structure of the win7 install cd is not very well documented (and doesn't look easy from the small amount of research I've done) or I would just put it in another folder.


Any suggestions?


Thanks for the help everyone,
Rob

[robknc]

Well maybe modification of the bcd file used for Windows7 wasn't so hard after all:

So I used bcdedit.exe to change bcd from this:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {default}
displayorder            {default}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {default}
device                  ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
path                    \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe
description             Windows Setup
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
osdevice                ramdisk=[boot]\sources\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
systemroot              \windows
detecthal               Yes
winpe                   Yes
ems                     Yes

To this:

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {default}
displayorder            {default}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {default}
device                  ramdisk=[boot]\win7aio\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
path                    \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe
description             Windows Setup
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
osdevice                ramdisk=[boot]\win7aio\boot.wim,{7619dcc8-fafe-11d9-b411-000476eba25f}
systemroot              \windows
detecthal               Yes
winpe                   Yes
ems                     Yes

I then copied everything on the drive and renamed "sources" to "win7aio"... Still no luck, it boots to an error . Apparently the \sources\ path is hard-coded in the WIM files that are referenced (or somewhere other than bcd). From what I've found online several threads on the topic of bcd modification state that it's not possible to make it look in another folder for it

The only other workaround for this I can think of is to put the win7 cd on it's own partition, but I think that will interfere with the operation of the flash drive in Windows. (using a 64gb Corsair Survivor GTR for this project)


If anyone knows of a way to get around the ctrl-x thing on bt4, has a workaround for the bcd "sources" deal, or has any other suggestions please feel free to pipe in. I really like BT4, but if I can't fix this I'll either have to deal with the ctrl-x deal or find another security distro (that probably wouldn't compare to bt4 ).


Rob

[robknc]

I did a google search and ran across this thread:
http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forum...es-folder.html

It's not just grub4dos, syslinux behaves in the same manner. Based on all the troubleshooting I've done thus far, the OP in the thread above does seem correct -- this looks like a bug specific to the BT distro. I have every other distro that ships with Katana (and Knoppix) running on the same drive and none of them have this issue when a folder called sources exists on the root of the drive.