How to install Backtrack without a live boot?

[celri]

Hello all,

After searching around on google and a tech-help site or two, I've found that my laptop is unable to boot from it's CD drive or a USB drive, and I find myself wondering about how to install without either of those. I've noticed some people request for a backtrack version of wubi, but I've seen those casually dismissed, with stuff like "real BackTrack users don't use wubi". Well, why not? Although my experience in this area is limited, wubi is useful. But I digress. Without the option to boot from USB or CD, I need another option to use. Hmm... Or I could replace my current BIOS(that's where I think the problem is) with something a little bit more useful.. any recommendations? I'm even willing to open up this laptop myself, if that drastic of a measure is needed. This laptop is nearing it's replacement time(I'd give it about a year and a half), and if I broke something permanently, I would just have one more excuse to get a better one. Oh.. I apologize for rambling, I tend to do that a lot.

Regards,
celri

[Snayler]

I've never heard of switching a BIOS on a laptop. HDD, RAM, Wireless card, even the CPU, but never the BIOS. About your install problem, you still have 2 options left. One of them is PXE Network boot, which is difficult to setup, according to my previous experiences in the area. The other option, and better one IMO is using VirtualBox or VMWare to install BT5 into your hard drive (and I mean, really install it into your HDD, not using it as a virtual machine). I wrote two tutorials for BT4, process should be similar with BT5. Hit me up (PM) if you have any doubt. Attachments: Install BT4 Dual Boot using VMware Workstation||Installing BT4 to HDD using VirtualBox

[celri]

Hmm... This is a conundrum. I have the message 'Your administrator has disabled private messaging.' when I go to notifications. Is there something I have to do to earn that? Until then.. How do I get your attention.. can I just @Snayler ?

Anyway, I'm using VMware Workstation, and I can't get Step 3 of http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forum...ad.php?t=30095 to work, I always get this error, no matter what I've done(attached image). Thanks in advance for helping .

[Snayler]

Yeah, I forgot to mention that. VMWare seems not able to control full disks anymore, since VMWare v8, I guess. The workaround is, instead of selecting full disk, select only the partition you want to install BT5 to. It will work fine like that, grub will be installed too.

PM seems to be disabled for everyone. If you want to contact me, just post in this thread. Since I am subscribed (the forum subscribes me to any thread I comment on), I will receive an e-mail when something is added to the thread.

[celri]

Well, I was able to install BackTrack, but I think I may have a small problem. I installed Ubuntu previously with wubi, and it uses the Windows Boot Manager to allow me to choose between both of them. I believe Backtrack was supposed to install something called GRUB, something to let me choose which OS to boot, right? Well when I get to the WBM, I get a choice of either Windows or Ubuntu, and both boot normally from there. Do I need to uninstall Wubi? I don't have anything vital on it, I just like playing around with it and getting used to the CLI. Again, thank you for helping .

[Snayler]

Well, I was able to install BackTrack, but I think I may have a small problem. I installed Ubuntu previously with wubi, and it uses the Windows Boot Manager to allow me to choose between both of them. I believe Backtrack was supposed to install something called GRUB, something to let me choose which OS to boot, right? Well when I get to the WBM, I get a choice of either Windows or Ubuntu, and both boot normally from there. Do I need to uninstall Wubi? I don't have anything vital on it, I just like playing around with it and getting used to the CLI. Again, thank you for helping .

Googling "How to install grub" will help you with that. I think you can even do it from your ubuntu partition.

[gregrtw]

... Never mind found the issue!

New question : When it loads BT opening screen, it never opens and start spamming thousand of error lines but too fast to do read etc... and it never stop, and the BT5 graphic flickers..

When I created the Virtual Hard Drive (VMDK), it was created in C:\... however, my primary partition for BT5 is my E:\ drive. So now it says (on the virtualbox) that this vmdk is around 500GB (my whole HDD) however, my C:\ is around 350GB and my E:\ around 150GB. Is there a way to completely remove the vmdk and remake it but so it only uses the 150GB of the E:\ ?

And do you think that the exceeding storage size virtually created on the vmdk (compared to C:\) is what is making the error when booting BT5 as a CD in virtualbox?

Thanks in advance